How Toyota broke data silos, cut duplicate work in its factories

At Toyota North America, the Japanese concept of "muda"—or waste in all its forms—drives continuous improvement across 15 sites and 80 shops. Even with decades of lean manufacturing experience, however, the company discovered that its digital infrastructure was creating waste, consuming 240 hours monthly on repetitive tasks at each site.

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"We believe that having problems is a good thing because it helps us uncover our deficiencies and waste," said Chase Brown, lead IIoT architect at Toyota North America, during his presentation at Inductive Automation’s annual Ignition Community Conference. "The teachings of Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, said having no problems is the biggest problem of all."

The problem Toyota uncovered was significant: their data collection processes were riddled with motion waste, over-processing and waiting—three of the costliest forms of muda in manufacturing operations.

The hidden cost of digital fragmentation

Toyota's challenge wasn't a lack of data or technology. The company had always collected manufacturing data, but it existed in fragmented systems across their enterprise. Engineers and technicians found themselves logging into multiple systems, redeploying tags and reconfiguring connections repeatedly.

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"Motion is a huge waste for us,” Brown said, “because we have people that are going to numerous different systems, whether they're logging in remotely or going to a kiosk on the floor to log in to create connections to individual PLC tags to start the data collection process."

This motion waste cascaded into over-processing, as multiple teams would often connect to the same PLC from different systems, creating duplicate data and duplicate work.

"This amounted to around 240 hours wasted every single month on repetitive tag and creation management at each of our sites," Brown noted. "Think about what could be done if those resources were freed up to deliver value and not manage a status quo process."

Toyota's traditional point-to-point integration architecture also created data silos where information was "everywhere and nowhere," lacking context and relationships, Brown said. As the company continued to build and deploy new systems, the complexity only increased, making troubleshooting nearly impossible.

Editor's note: Check out the rest of this story over at Smart Industry's sister brand, Automation World.