Toyota Producing Quality

We invest in people, training and ways of working to ensure every vehicle we make is of the highest quality, meeting the high standards we set and striving to go beyond.

We are committed to building vehicles of the highest quality using precision production processes and a skilled and dedicated workforce. Every vehicle we make undergoes thousands of checks to ensure that safety, performance and build quality are outstanding, meeting our demanding standards.

To help people learn and understand quality, we provide comprehensive training. This includes apprenticeships for young people starting out on their careers and regular skills development opportunities for our established workforce. Experience and knowledge are shared across generations, strengthening the commitment to quality. The success of our training is reflected in many awards gained at national and international levels.

* Andon means ‘Sign’ or ‘Signal’. It is a a visual aid which alerts and highlights where action is required and indicates the line has been stopped due to some irregularity.

A sequence of 2,000 checks are performed to ensure safety, performance and built quality.

Intensive training is provided to help our members learn and understand quality.

Toyota Superior Quality

Toyota has achieved a reputation for the production of very high quality vehicles in all countries around the world. This has been achieved by an approach to quality control and quality assurance, which is unique to Toyota and has been developed over many years. From the early stages of the design process up until our vehicles come off the line, quality is key at Toyota.

You can see it in the materials, the fit and finish, and the innovative new technology that we put into each of our vehicles. Quality is the basic prerequisite to achieve customer smiles and is built in every activity we do. The way we manufacture our vehicles is embodied in the Toyota Production System (TPS).

The way we make vehicles is defined by the Toyota Production System (TPS).

Quality assured in every vehicle

The people who build our vehicles take a personal pride in the quality of their work. Every vehicle will undergo thousands of quality checks in the course of the manufacturing process.

The process of building a vehicle involves many people working in sequence on many different tasks. Everyone on the production line has a responsibility ensuring quality at every stage, a personal engagement in the job that culminates in the quality assurance checks that are carried out before any vehicle leaves the factory.

The men and women who carry out the thousands of checks we insist on are proud of what they do to ensure that every customer can be sure of their vehicle’s safety and quality.

Quality assurance

The mission

The mission of our quality assurance teams is to ensure that every vehicle that leaves our factories, anywhere in the world, meets our high standards for safety and quality.

A sequence of 2,000 checks will be carried out on each vehicle before it is signed off ready for delivery to the customer.

“Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of an intelligent effort.”
John Ruskin, Philosopher

Quality Assurance Team Leader

Amanda Rowland is a Quality Assurance Team Leader at Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK) Limited, where our Auris and Avensis models are built.

She is proud of the role she and her colleagues play in checking each vehicle that comes off the line, making sure that build quality is correct and that all the different functions are operating properly.

In this video she explains the thoroughness of the quality assurance process and the personal responsibility the teams take for delivering vehicles that are safe and of the highest quality to the customer.

Main quality checks made in plants

Building quality skills through learning

Through training, experience, skills sharing and competition, we make sure that successive generations in our workforce are able to gain and develop the talents needed to deliver the best quality.

The concept of manufacturing quality is something that is constantly changing, as we develop new vehicles, find better ways of working and our customers refine their tastes and preferences.

This is why it is important for us always to be learning about quality, whether it is by providing apprenticeships and skills development for young people starting out on their careers, or giving our established workforce training and opportunities to gain new skills. The high job quality achieved by our people has been recognised in many awards at national and international levels.

European global production centre

The Mission

Our European Global Production Centre is a key resource in providing training to improve the work done in our manufacturing businesses across Europe.

Its mission is to provide training and to develop solutions that are directly applicable to the work done on our production lines, transferring learning to the workplace by providing coaching.

In this way, it aims to improve organisational capability and build self-reliance in our European manufacturing companies.

The European global production centre has further solidified the "Made by TOYOTA" philosophy of manufacturing vehicles across the globe with consistent quality assurance.

The Team

The European Global Production Centre is based at Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK) Limited, but provides training services to all our European manufacturing operations.

The team compromises a manager and five trainers who travel to our factories to train local training teams in a wide range of disciplines, including quality control and continuous improvement (kaizen) methods, and to provide shop floor coaching for supervisors. In the course of a year they will provide more than 350 man-days of training and coaching.

Quality training for future generations

Apprenticeships – Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK) Limited activities

Providing apprenticeship training helps equip a new generation with the skills our business, and industry in general, need in order to secure future growth and success. Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK) Limited has pioneered this training, working with a local further education college to establish an Apprenticeship Development Centre.

It provides apprenticeships not just for young people from its own workforce, but also from suppliers and other small and medium-size businesses in the local region. The excellent quality of its work has been recognised with awards from the UK’s national skills council, SEMTA.

Members of Toyota Motor Manufacturing (UK) Limited Apprentice Development Centre in 2015.

Quality led by experience – Takumi craftsmanship

Although modern, computer-controlled production processes help us produce quality that is perfect to a fraction of a millimetre, time and again, there are areas of our work where the human hand and eye remain the best tools we can use.

For example, our takumi master craftspeople are responsible for the hand-finishing and fine quality checking of our Lexus models. It takes years of experience to perfect their precision skills – talents that they pass on to new generations through teaching and coaching.

Lexus Takumi Master craftsmen at Lexus factory in Japan.

International recognition and the World Skills competition

The skills learned by Toyota’s people are regularly put to the test in national and international competition. The successes achieved by our men and women demonstrate the effectiveness of our training programmes and individual commitment to learn, improve and apply personal skills.

The World Skills International event, held every two years, brings together the world’s best apprentices from across all types of industry in friendly competition. We have a proud record of achievement having won 50 medals, including 23 golds, up to the most recent event, held in 2015 in Brazil. This success helps inspire the next group of apprentices to develop and demonstrate their own skills to the best of their abilities.