Infosys-Oracle Blog

Standardization has long been hailed as a means of attaining more efficiency in manufacturing. Standard parts, standard processes, standard means of doing things, all allow keeping variability down. Standardization of work activities, hand movements etc have long been in practice and are seen as a way to time processes and improve them and make them more efficient. The benefits of standardization have encouraged companies to standardize various aspects of their entire supply chains also. For example, companies have standardized their way of distributing products, way their retail stores are designed, product range, look and feel of documents and so on and so forth.

Recently however, opinions have been voiced from different quarters as to whether the recent huge number of vehicle recalls from car manufacturers such as Toyota is owed significantly to the high degree of standardization that the Toyota supply chain operates under? In Toyota, right from the design phase, emphasis is placed to develop a design that takes into consideration the requirement to use standard parts. This emphasis on standard parts helps Toyota to reduce the variability in design, processes, assembling and procurement and thus reducing the effort required to manage the variability. However, some have raised voices that since the same standard part is used across model variants, if one such part is defective, it could have a cascading effect on a lot of vehicle models. Even if only a few lots of defective parts have escaped and gone into a vehicle, it could means that multiple vehicle models have been impacted and not just a single model or product line.