Exploring Manufacturing in a Digital World: Toyota's Virtual Plant Tour Offers Authentic Insight
In a groundbreaking move, Toyota has launched its Virtual Plant Tour, offering a unique, immersive, and accessible experience of its manufacturing processes from a human-centric perspective. This project, inspired by the passion of Kiichiro Toyoda for showcasing the people behind Toyota's monozukuri, is a testament to the company's commitment to innovation, inclusivity, and supporting workers.
The Virtual Plant Tour, developed over the course of a year, aims to provide a behind-the-scenes look at Toyota’s manufacturing environment in an engaging and innovative way. It leverages advanced virtual technologies to simulate the plant experience remotely, allowing a diverse audience to explore how Toyota integrates technology with human skills to create high-quality products.
At the heart of Toyota's manufacturing evolution is its core principle of "continuous kaizen or improvement". This philosophy ensures that the company's processes are constantly evolving, with people at the heart of this evolution. Executive Fellow Mitsuru Kawai and Oyaji Kawai, who guided the project, reiterate Toyota's strength lies in evolution through kaizen.
The Virtual Plant Tour project team interviewed over 40 people to find the content and site design that best communicated their philosophy and dedication to a wider audience. Before the suspension, Toyota welcomed around 130,000 visitors annually, primarily to its Motomachi, Takaoka, and Tsutsumi plants in Toyota City. However, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the auto industry, leading to plant shutdowns and delays in parts procurement and logistics. In response, the staff came up with the idea of launching a website where people can remotely tour the plants.
Akiko Kita, Group Manager of the Toyota Virtual Plant Tour project, leads the team in their mission to convey the expertise and ingenuity of the plant workers and their tireless pursuit of improvement. The project is designed around "human-centered monzukuri", focusing on showcasing worker contributions and technology integration.
The Toyota Kaikan Museum, which operates the plant tours and is in charge of the Toyota Virtual Plant Tour project, received messages from customers wishing to visit again after the suspension. The Virtual Plant Tour website has been launched, allowing online visitors to experience the company's manufacturing processes. Over 13.3 million people have toured these facilities since they opened, and the Virtual Plant Tour project promises to continue this tradition, albeit in a digital format.
In summary, the philosophy behind the Virtual Plant Tour centers on human-centered innovation, highlighting worker contributions and technology integration, while the development involves creating an immersive virtual environment for broader engagement with Toyota’s manufacturing culture and processes. The project reaffirms Toyota’s guiding principles and commitment to a sustainable and human-centered future in manufacturing.
The Virtual Plant Tour, a testament to Toyota's commitment to innovation, showcases the integration of technology with human skills in the manufacturing industry, providing a unique, remote experience to those finance- constraint or geographically remote, thereby broadening the audience for Toyota's human-centric manufacturing processes.
The project, rooted in Toyota's philosophy of "continuous kaizen" and "human-centered monozukuri", continues to uphold the company's guiding principles by reinforcing the importance of worker contributions, technology integration, and a sustainable, human-centered future in manufacturing, ensuring the evolving dynamism of Toyota within the global technology landscape.
