I worked for a similar company previously as well— a Toyota subsidiary. While I largely agree with you, in North America I can't help but think that some of th

I worked for a similar company previously as well— a Toyota subsidiary. While I largely agree with you, in North America I can't help but think that some of the principles are sometimes mis-applied. Related to the principle of Kaizen, I was witness to continuous improvement being used as justification to continually demand more of employees to the point where practices like you've mentioned were actually discouraged. If your machine stopped for that long, management and maintenance would be flagged down automatically. 20 to 30 minutes of downtime in a day would have been flat-out unacceptable no matter the reason. The cause being that if your workflow increased in efficiency and accuracy to the point where manufacturing goals were being matched and or beat, the goals would increase without investigation. after a few iterations of that, operators would find themselves always below the threshold of required output. This was often used as justification to let employees go to fill the positions with temp staffers. Keep in mind this was over a decade ago and was local NA management's initiatives. So I guess like anything it has to be applied properly to see the proclaimed benefits.