3.- CAN SPAIN BE 'TOYOTIST'?

(Escrito en English)

To begin with, I would like to explain what we mean by the term 'Toyotism'. It is a concept that appears to define the new production and management system that replaced the 'Fordism', created at the beginning of the last century by Henry Ford. 'Fordism' had been the reference system worldwide until then. Ford, realized that, despite the variety of car manufacturers, the offer was insufficient. So, he proposed a new system based on: production line; standardization of products (if a company specializated in a particular product, the production costs decreased); product popularization (there was a wider product choice and this made possible the sale price may be lower) and   efficiency wages (the companies paid a bonus to workers to reduce staffing changes). Curiously, 'the Ford Model T', was four times cheaper than other cars in the market and it was always black painted because the paint was less slow to dry, which made possible a quicker sale.

Faced with all this, at the beginning of the 70s, appeared Taiichi Ohno. As an engineer of a Japanese car company called Toyota, he was asked to turn around the company policy seeking greater effiency. Ohno, developed a system known as 'Toyotism'. After many observations, he established these guidelines: decrease of the stock in the warehouse (the company works on demand with orders to the supplier as needed in a system called 'Just in Time'); workers are flexible and versatile (they are able to work with the machinery and help solve production problems); companies can make great variety of products; there are some 'new concepts' ('Poka-Yoke', 'Kaizen',...); teamwork.

Does it sound familiar?. Since the 80s, Western society looked to Japan trying to find the answer to this question: 'Why the 'Japanese system' was better?'. And, the answer was to adapt this method to Western society. In Spain, this meant to promote teamwork, among other things. But, as we said before, the 'Japanese method' was not based exclusively on teamwork. This was just a cog in a much bigger machine which worked perfectly in a country that barely knew the terms 'free-rider' or shirk.

And I say it is absurd to think you can do this sort of extrapolation.Teamwork, for example, is no better or worse than Individual work. You just have to see under what conditions can be implemented. In addition, issues such as the need for a strong coordination with suppliers; the fact that each worker must be responsible for the machines they are working with; Improvement Groups (groups of workers who voluntarily meet outside the working hours to discuss possible improvements in the work); etc. suggest that it is possible that this system might not be suitable for Spain.

What really made Taiichi Ohno was identify the pieces and design a system to fit them. Ohno did not adapt 'Fordism' to Japan but created a new system based in the peculiarities of the country, as well as 'Fordism' was a system tailored to the needs of the United States.

In my opinion, we should not assume that the systems are universal. We can not think that what is done in Germany, for example, could be applied in Spain. Each issue has a solution and to find it we should analyze what we want to improve and how we can do it, forgetting 'easy solutions' applied in other contexts. So, in Spain, we should investigate what we have, what objective we want to achieve and how we can get it. We should analyze what is special here and what can we do to have a more efficient system. And this analysis should be done at all levels. Do you agree?.