Toyota has just fired some robots, calling back the workers
Mitsuru Kawai (right), VP of Toyota, and Henrik Bork visiting a Toyota crankshaft workshop. (Photo by Ben Weller)
Why is Toyota rethinking its approach to automation, sometimes betting on workers again where the robots had already taken over? Mitsuru Kawai, Vice President and Head of Manufacturing at Toyota (right), recently explained it to me.
Workers replacing robots
When robots get fired, it happens without much ado. They are not called into the office and offered severance pay. They probably don´t need that, either. Still, I feel a little bit sorry for them. Toyota has just fired some robots, calling back the workers that had been replaced by them.
Wait a moment…“Workers replacing robots?” Is this a correct summary for what is happening here? Yes, it is. No mistake, it is not the other way round. This is exactly what is currently going on at Toyota in Japan. I watched it with my own eyes. I flew there, and their VP showed me. One of the world´s most innovative car manufactures is throwing out robots from production lines they had already taken over, and is bringing back the workers.
As a former foreign correspondent in both Japan and China, this is interesting for me. Because I know that this is news. “Workers replacing robots” reads like a model headline from a journalism handbook. In journalism schools they teach you that “dog bites man” is not news. “Man bites dog” is news.
In our context here this means: We have all gotten used to articles telling us that the future of work will be dominated by robots and automation. We read that many of us will be in trouble in the not so distant future, because our jobs, from assembly line workers to journalists and medical doctors, may be being taken over by robots. It´s them replacing us, slowly but inevitably, right?
Well, maybe not. Or not so fast.
Toyota´s new, careful approach to automation
Toyota, an industry leader with a clear reputation as trendsetter, is taking a different approach. Toyota is putting humans back on assembly lines and other work stations that had already been claimed by robots. Somehow, this is not only news. It is also heartwarming. It gives hope. The future of work may be much more human-centric and pleasant than we currently assume.
Mitsuru Kawai, the 70-year old Vice President of Toyota, recently sat down with me for an hour-long conversation about Toyota´s automation strategy. Before I summarize the most important things I learned from this inspiring man, let me thank Roland Berger´s CEO magazine “Think Act” for making this possible. They sent me to Nagoya City to interview Mr. Kawai, who not only took time out of a very busy schedule (he is the boss of more than 360.000 workers worldwide, after all). The vice president personally and Toyota´s communications team also accompanied me through several of their most modern car manufacturing plants.
You can find my feature story about automation with a human touch, written for Think Act, Roland Berger´s magazine for CEOs and thought leaders, here:
This is the English version. There is also a German version for download, which can be found at the end of the English article.
The Vice President who started as a blacksmith
It was a great honor to meet Mitsuru Kawai, the Vice President and Head of Manufacturing of the Toyota Motor Corporation. Mitsuru Kawai started his career at Toyota when he was 15 years old. He first worked as a blue collar worker, then slowly rose through the ranks to his current role, where he is in charge of all Toyota plants worldwide. Wearing a white helmet, shouting over the hissing and hammering, he showed me where he had once stood as a young man, in the workshop a few meters across from his current office.
“It was here that I worked as a blacksmith”, he said with pride.
Today this part of Toyota´s production is almost completely automated. Robots are grabbing iron bars from fires, swiftly turn and place the still red pieces of hot metal onto anvils, where other robots are getting ready to shape them into crankshafts. “I automated this line myself”, Kawai says with the same pride. You know, before we turn to his efforts against the mindless use of robots, it is important to note that Kawai is not an enemy of automation.
Some time ago Kawai noticed that some of the robots that worked for Toyota underperformed. One example he described to me was the base of the Toyota Land Cruiser, which, due to its considerable size, has to be welded together from several slabs of metal. The seems that the welding robots left behind were uneven. The quality was good, but could clearly be better. “We´ll do it manually again”, Kawai declared. He threw out the robots and replaced them with workers.
And the workers were better. Unlike the robots, humans could react very nimbly to the slightest change on the surface of the metal sheets. The result of bringing back the workers was better quality and a reduction of the use of welding wire, meaning considerable cost cuttings for Toyota.
Human skills make all the difference
The same process has since been repeated in many parts of Toyota´s production. Their friendly and efficient communications team team showed me an entire car plant, the Motomachi plant which lies a short car ride away from Toyota´s headquarters near Nagoya. It is a hyper-modern car plant, producing the hydrogen-powered Mirai which Toyota hopes t be the car of the future, but not a single robot can be found in the whole factory. “We do everything manually here in order to better train Toyota workers from plants around the world”, said the plant director showing me around.
Mr. Kawai, the Toyota VP who started as a worker himself, noticed that more and more of his employees were losing basic skills, as they were just made to watch or maintain robots. “That bothered me”, said Kawai. He asked himself how he could “use their skills and ideas, and still build automated processes.”
Kawai sent out a team touring the globe with the instruction to find inspirations. They found it in one of Toyota´s car plants in São Bernardo near Sao Paulo, Brazil. The plant was lagging behind in terms of automation, almost all processes were still carried out by hand. Kawai had some key machines from the Brazilian plant crated, shipped across the ocean, and reassembled in one of Toyota´s plants in Nagoya City. They are now used to train workers, and to instill in them the “spirit of São Bernardo”.
Workers assembling a Mirai, one of Toyota´s most innovative cars, completely without the use of a single robot. (Photo by Ben Weller)
It is the spirit of keeping humans in key positions. The spirit of using robots, digitalization and artificial intelligence as enhancements, as tools for the true masters of the plant - human beings. It is the spirit of a human-centric, smart approach to automation.
There is no question that automation is and will continue to be a key trend in all industries. Mitsuru Kawai thinks so himself. Toyota keeps on automating. And in a recent global survey by McKinsey, three-quarters of respondents said they have already begun automation processes or plan to do so within the next year (See McKinsey´s “The Automation Imperative” from Sept. 2018 here https://mck.co/2SkEtlp).
But unfortunately at present man of the automation efforts of companies are a “top-down” affair. Automation is often sold to companies by consultants, computer engineers and “Industry 4.0 experts” as not only an imperative, but also with the main argument that it is good for cost-cutting. But this is not always the case. And many of these highly-educated experts have never really worked in a manufacturing plant themselves, not even for a few days.
The results of such top-down efforts are, in the Toyota VP´s own words, “often very complex and expensive systems”. Now Toyota is still introducing new robots, but only where they produce more cost-effective than workers. Or, to say it bluntly, only where it really makes sense.
When Toyota introduces new robots, it only does so after studying the manual workflow very carefully. Kawai then asks the workers themselves to program the robots, assisted by computer engineers. That is what happened with the welding station for the Landcruiser base mentioned earlier. The welding is now done by robots again, after workers trained them. Only one worker is left to supervise the process. All other workers have been retrained and work somewhere else in the factory.
Workers are needed for innovation
Another major advantage of Toyota´s new, careful approach to automation is that it is the smarter choice in terms of innovation. Imagine the so-called “lights-out-factory” that was heralded until very recently by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla. A factory where only robots work, not a single human, could switch out the lights, save electricity and produce cars in complete darkness, or so the gospel went. This would of course be technically possible, said Toyota´s Kawai. He was being polite. “But such a factory would always remain stuck at the same stage of development”, he said. Only workers can come to him, present ideas on how processes can be optimized, how waste can be avoided. Robots can´t do that. So Toyota wants to keep its workers. All of them.
Even Elon Musk has recently changed his mind, by the way. Automation at his plants may have happened too fast, the CEO of Tesla told journalists.
To be sure, the discussion about new technologies, how they can be applied in a human-centric way, is not new. But a lot of the critical thinking in this area has focussed on certain areas where artificial intelligence or robots may never be able to replace the “warm touch of a human hand” or the individual care for an elderly person.
I admire, for example, the MIT professor Sherry Turkle´s essays, who frequently reminds us of the superiority of human beings over machines (e.g. “There will never be an age of artificial intimacy”, published in the New York Times: https://nyti.ms/2vzMgmg). But in many areas the superiority of robots is already being taken for granted. Car plants are one of those areas. That is why it matters when a sophisticated brand like Toyota rethinks its relationship with machines.
It is possible that it makes a lot of sense to keep humans in charge of all industrial processes, to search for a more human-centric way of automation than the current one driven largely by tech-centric consultants and engineers, not only in car manufacturing. Not only do workers deserve to be protected from losing their jobs out of humanitarian or political concerns.
It may ultimately prove to be more productive and sustainable from an economic point of view to keep workers in their jobs.
Or, to rephrase that thought: There may be an imperative to automate in a human-centric way.
Having worked in my father´s metal workshop in Germany as a young man, I immediately liked Mitsuru Kawai´s way of thinking and demeanor. Wearing a simple worker´s uniform, the Vice President of Toyota does not try to impress anyone. He talked in the same down-to-earth manner like my late father, modest, yet passionate when the conversation turned to topics like the quality of products, to the difference half a millimeter can make in a welding seem. In many companies I visit, I am told that the employees are their most valuable asset. At Toyota this same statement came across as very honest.
The two of us, Mitsuru Kawai and the author of this article, having both worked with our own hands in metal workshops as young men, enjoyed talking to each other. While posing for a photo in one of Toyota´s crankshaft workshops, Kawai spontaneously put his arm around my shoulder.
“More and more of our workers are getting older”, Kawai told me later, as he escorted me to the car that was about to bring me back to the railway station in Nagoya. “We don´t want to lose their valuable expertise. We are now developing robots just to make work easier for those elderly workers”.
In the end, the future of work may be neither about robots replacing workers, nor about workers replacing robots. It may be about workers and robots finding the best way to coexist, with workers still in charge. Where we stand right now, however, I believe that “workers replacing robots” is good news.
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What do you think? Will the future of work be dominated by robots, or will humans still have an important role to play? Please leave your comment here below, thank you.
Published November 28, 2018 on Asia Waypoint´s blog “China Notepad”
By Henrik Bork. He is the founder and Managing Director of Asia Waypoint (www.asiawaypoint.com), a communications consulting and research agency in Beijing, and a co-founder of Lychee.com, a Chinese Online Travel Agency for boutique and luxury hotels. A former correspondent for Germany´s leading daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Beijing and Tokyo, he likes talking to people, writing, and traveling.
Photos by Ben Weller, a professional photographer based in Japan: www.wellerpix.com
