Toyota's future manufacturing plans see humans replacing robots

In a turnabout, Toyota has started taking jobs away from robots -- and is giving them to humans.

Inside Toyota Motor Corp.'s oldest plant, there's a corner where humans have taken over from robots in thwacking glowing lumps of metal into crankshafts. This is Mitsuru Kawai's vision of the future.

The only way to improve processes and promote more thinking about efficiency is to put people back in charge of making things. The goal is to create a more efficient car production line.

This Toyota’s latest strategy has two main aspects. First, it wants to make sure that workers truly understand the work they’re doing instead of feeding parts into machines and being helpless when one breaks down. Second, it wants to figure out ways to make processes higher quality and more efficient in the long run. The company worries that automation means it has too many average workers and not enough craftsmen and masters. 

“We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them,” said Kawai, a half century-long company veteran tapped by President Akio Toyoda to promote craftsmanship at Toyota’s plants. “When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything.”

Machines are great at doing things quickly and at low cost. But people, especially ones with the experience of performing tasks themselves, bring craftsmanship, insight into process design, and consistency of quality. Toyota has found that the race to reduce the human element can end up making processes less efficient.

Some of the experts around the Toyota Way, as the company's famous production method is known, have taken note.

 "Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level," said Jeff Liker, who has written eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year.

 "In almost every company you would visit, the workers' jobs are to feed parts into a machine and call somebody for help when it breaks down."