The Prius That Shook.. - VFAQ Prius Site

indispensable to achieve short-term development."
After the series of problems was solved, Tagami
summarized his lesson.
"Frankly, this is not working. It needs to work more
systematically. One of the major tasks given to the Prius project
was to standardize the development process. We must change
the nature of manufacturing through Prius. Fortunately, we
came out of this problem through the cooperation of
everyone. However, if we don't reflect on the actual nature of
the problem, we may not be so lucky next time. How
effective is our concurrent engineering practice? We can pass
on our accomplishments only by standardizing the process
taken to achieve them. How could it have been made more
efficient, simple, quick, and secure? The production
technology group must think this through thoroughly."
In many ways, as Tagami had noted, this problem was
solved quickly thanks to the importance of the Prius
project itself and through the good relationship between the
engineers at Higashifuji Technical Center and those at Head
Office technology division. This problem brought out both
the good and the bad of Toyota's manufacturing capability.
Despite it all, Tagami said, "I guess we are much better now
than five years ago when we started advocating the concurrent
engineering policy."
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