The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2013–2014
Yamaha made production performance visible daily so each cell can manage its own profit
Yamaha replaced monthly paper-and-Excel reports with tablets and a live dashboard, cutting 50 hours of reporting a month and aiming at cell-level P&L.
Yamaha
The solution
Yamaha's Toyooka production division makes electronic instruments, about 41% of the group's instrument sales, and had long practiced Toyota Production System kaizen on direct work. By 2013 it hit the limit of direct-work improvement: indirect labor, report writing and non-production time were rising, and management only saw production results monthly.
The plant chose a different route: standardize three indicators — productivity, defect rate and non-production time — and rebuild reporting around them. Paper-and-pencil logs were replaced by tablet-based point-of-production entry feeding a real-time dashboard, so the day's results became visible immediately.
The effect was concrete: the foreman's monthly Excel report, about 50 hours of work, disappeared; weekly meetings use the live dashboard as the report. Production staff now examine defect-rate dashboards, drill down and download data for root-cause analysis, closing improvement cycles in days.
The stated next step is cell-based management — showing material, labor and other expenses per production cell in money terms so each cell knows whether it is profitable, putting profit-and-loss awareness on the shop floor.
Why it worked
- Three standard indicators made data comparable across the plant
- Daily visibility let production staff run PDCA themselves
- Tablet entry removed the paper-to-Excel transcription bottleneck
- Cell-level P&L planning pushed profit awareness to the floor
What can be applied
Improvement loops die on stale data: cut report latency and put the numbers where the people who act can see them every day, not once a month.
Aftermath
WingArc reports about 5 million yen a year in report-creation cost savings; Yamaha's next step is cell-based management, showing material, labor and other costs per cell so each production cell knows whether it is in profit or loss, and unifying indicators across overseas plants.
Sources
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