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Toyota replaces robots with humas
While it may sound nonsensical, the images starts to make sense when considering some aphorisms on automation (on the line of "Computers have enabled people to make more mistakes faster than almost any invention in history, with the possible exception of tequila and hand guns") and consider the recent [wikipedia.org] recalls [drive.com.au] of millions of cars [forbes.com].
Well, it's far from suggesting that robots were causing the faults or that, by replacing robots by humans, they'll will diminish the rate of reproducing the faults with high efficiency. However Toyota has a culture for quality [wikipedia.org] for quite a long time [wikipedia.org] and seems to have identified the lack of quality (which caused the recalls) in the distance the computers and automation places between the workers and the product they manufacture
Learning how to make car parts from scratch gives younger workers insights they otherwise wouldn't get from picking parts from bins and conveyor belts, or pressing buttons on machines.
In an area [...] at the forging division of Toyota's Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap by 10% and shortening the production line 96% from its length three years ago.
760 workers take part in 96 percent of the production process at its Motomachi plant in Japan — Toyota introduced multiple lines dedicated to manual labor in each of Toyota's factories in its home country
"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."
Kawai, 65, started with Toyota during the era of Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System envied by the auto industry for decades with its combination of efficiency and quality. That means Kawai has been living most of his life adhering to principles of kaizen, or continuous improvement, and monozukuri, which translates to the art of making things.
