Recently, the news of a model sales has attracted great attention.
As an "evergreen" car, the gac Toyota Camry has been the sales representative of the mid-level car, and the eighth generation Camry is the first model built by GAC Toyota based on the TNGA architecture.
26121, 25341 - This is camry's sales figures for October and November, of which October sales broke the historical monthly sales record, considering the recent fluctuations in the automotive industry supply chain, such sales results are enough to be described as "exaggerated" and "excellent".
A car sells well in the short term, there will be reasons such as product freshness and good marketing, but a car can break through the sales of new highs after many years of hot sales, the core reason is naturally the product strength and quality are excellent, and to understand this "core reason", the most direct way is to go to the factory that manufactures new cars.
Specific to GAC Toyota, it is the "better car" manufactured through TNGA, which continues to be recognized by the market, the Camry has repeatedly reached new highs, and highlanders and Willanda are also hot. In order to find the mystery behind the high quality, recently, the reporter also walked into the GAC Toyota factory and became a "one-day craftsman" to explore this "zero defect rate" factory.
Every production line employee is a quality gatekeeper
The location of this exploration is the second production line of GAC Toyota, and consumers are familiar with many models such as Camry, Willanda, Highlander and so on.
Stamping, welding, painting, final assembly, inspection of the five manufacturing links, in the busy workshop busy and orderly, according to reports, each link here in accordance with Toyota's highest global standards of production. In addition to a variety of high-standard machinery and robots, what impressed reporters more was the role played by people.
The assembly workshop of the automobile factory is the place where the components are finally "integrated" before each vehicle goes off the production line, and the assembly workshop should pursue high efficiency, but it is also a place where defects are easy to appear and find defects.
As Toyota's "zero defect rate" factory, GAC Toyota's approach is to maximize the role of people and machines in the assembly workshop, and the machine is of course the determinant of efficiency, but the quality is good or bad, and the ultimate decision is people.
GAC Toyota controls the quality of the final assembly through the "two pillars" of just in time and self-service. "Punctuality" to avoid waste, improve efficiency, with the word "people" next to the automation, it requires people and machines to be able to automatically judge the quality of the process, when the problem is found, it can be stopped and improved in time, so as not to let the quality problem flow into the next process.
On the production line of GAC Toyota, yellow and red drawstrings are set up above the workstations, two ropes that look slightly contrary to modern technology, but tie an important quality "secret".
It is understood that the two-color drawstring and the monitoring display screen together form an Anton system that visualizes quality problems. Whenever the production line employees encounter an abnormal situation that cannot be solved, immediately pull the Anton pull rope, the display screen will timely feedback the problem point and the station, and send out an alarm in the form of sound and image, so that the problem point is 100% exposed, at this time, the line work team leader immediately handles it, such as the vehicle is still not solved before reaching the next station, the production line will automatically stop.
From the Anton system, it is not difficult to see that the employees of GAC Toyota's production line are not only simple producers, they are the first gatekeepers of quality problems, in the face of quality problems, there is no "privilege", any production line employee has the right to stop the production line, so that the quality problem can be solved "at that time and locally".
"Quality is manufactured in the process, not by inspection." During the visit, huang Zonghao, head of the quality management department of GAC Toyota, said this, and also told the "secret" of high quality, and there was no shortcut in the face of quality.
High and low quality, objective figures will give the answer, under the efforts of "all craftsmen", in 2020, the one-time pass rate of GAC Toyota's production line will increase to 99%, leading the industry average by 10 percentage points, the non-performing rate of the whole vehicle inspection will drop to 0.01 pieces / unit, while the defective rate of supplier parts will be reduced to 0.29PPM (that is, only 0.29 defects in 1 million parts). In the process of product manufacturing, "people" continue to find problems, overcome problems, product quality has also been continuously improved, it is understood that THE QUALITY PROPOSALs of GAC Toyota employees, as many as 12,000 pieces / year, the final adoption rate is as high as 99%.
"Black hat heavenly group": qualified products also need to "find fault"
When a day of craftsmen, of course, visitors can not really enter the production line, because this will affect normal production, but can be challenged, in front of a vehicle that has been deliberately "buried" to find out its quality problems.
On the same day, a group of media gathered in front of a "flawed" Velanda, trying to find out the quality problems that had been deliberately created, and worked back and forth for nearly an hour, and finally only a few quality problems were discovered. Craftsmen cannot be refined in a day, and the quality problems that are difficult for consumers to visually detect can not escape the eyes and hands of the "black hats" in the end.
At the GAC Toyota plant, there is a "secret quality base" independent of the manufacturing department, the quality assurance department's independent inspection class. Even vehicles that are qualified by the production line must continue to be "looking for fault" by them.
Wearing a black hat with the SQA (Independent Product Insurance Supervision) logo, in accordance with Toyota's global methods and benchmarks, evaluate the quality of the vehicle from the perspective of customers, more than 1500 evaluation items, the degree of harshness can be called "egg picking bones", a line produces about 700 cars a day, "black hats" to extract 4 vehicles from the qualified vehicles off the line of the factory for evaluation, they wear white gloves, supplemented by strong light equipment, from the painting surface, assembly, walking and other three aspects of the vehicle inspection.
"Such flaws are actually difficult for consumers to see." In front of the "defective" car, when the black hat brought out the quality problems one by one, the visitors were amazed, and some small flaws that did not look like quality problems were pulled out by the autonomous inspection team one by one.
In order to achieve the ultimate in quality, the independent inspection class has even set higher standards on the basis of Toyota standards. For example, most leather seats in cars make a friction sound when they sit down, and Japanese factories do not consider this a defect, but GAC Toyota's inspectors consider this situation from the perspective of Chinese consumers, determine this situation as a defect, and require suppliers to choose softer seat materials to improve the consumer experience. This kind of quality improvement may not even be achieved by many luxury brands.
Excellent quality to resist market fluctuations
Due to supply chain and other issues, the recent car market turmoil, in this context, GAC Toyota's recent sales report card, in addition to the total increase, the gold content of sales is worth saying.
In the past November, GAC Toyota sold 85,000 vehicles, TNGA architecture models sold red, camry 2.5L and HEV models accounted for more than half of the sales, reaching 55%, and high-end models played the leading role. The Willanda family sold more than 18,000 units, of which four-wheel drive models accounted for nearly 40%.
The data also shows that from January to October, GAC Toyota's cumulative sales of dual-engine hybrid models were 134,000 units, an increase of 84% year-on-year, accounting for 21% of total sales, equivalent to every 5 vehicles sold. The high-value models under the TNGA architecture have been further recognized by the market.
It can be seen that on the way to impacting higher sales, TNGA's design quality and manufacturing quality, coupled with GAC Toyota's quality control capabilities, form a joint force, so that GAC Toyota's models can smoothly ride the wind and waves, resist the unfavorable factors of the market, and achieve the upgrade of "sales quality".
What is valuable is that GAC Toyota is increasing sales while also improving product quality, and this kind of "finding fault" quality improvement has allowed GAC Toyota to continuously break through the ceiling of quality.
The market is ever-changing, but good products and good quality are always the most core competitiveness of car companies.
*Information