Toyota Motor Corp. has decided to replace automated machines in some factories in Japan with human workers.
Japan has 309,400 industrial robots, which is more than any country has, according to Quartz.
Toyota has two goals for this decision. The first is for workers to understand the work they do rather than feed parts into machines and be helpless when a machine breaks down. The second is to find ways to make work more efficient and higher in quality in the future. The company is concerned that it has too many workers of average capability and not enough masters and craftsmen.
Mitsuru Kawai, a Toyota veteran who promotes craftsmanship at the company's plants, talked about craftsmanship being the future of the company, The Economic Times reported.
"We need to become more solid and get back to basics, to sharpen our manual skills and further develop them," Kawai said. "When I was a novice, experienced masters used to be called gods, and they could make anything."
Kawai supervises an area at the forging division of Toyota's Honsha plant where, instead of using automated processes, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts.
Jeff Liker, who wrote eight books on Toyota and visited Kawai last year, talked about how important human workers are to the company, Bloomberg reported.
"Toyota views their people who work in a plant like this as craftsmen who need to continue to refine their art and skill level," Liker said. "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."
While machines are helpful in completing jobs quickly and at low costs, people provide craftsmanship, consistency of quality and insight into process design. Toyota believes that erasing the human element in production can bring down the efficiency in processes, Quartz reported.
"We cannot simply depend on the machines that only repeat the same task over and over again," Kawai said. "To be the master of the machine, you have to have the knowledge and the skills to teach the machine."
