Missing the bandwagon.

Thanks for providing a thought-provoking article ("Losing Momentum," January). In this case, however, not all my thoughts are perfectly positive.

In the interests of transparency, let me disclose that I have taken the NUMMI Tour five times which, I believe, qualifies me as a geek. It was easy for me to accomplish this feat because my Novartis manufacturing site is a 45-minute drive away from Fremont. Also, I should disclose that Novartis has set itself a target of becoming the "Toyota of the pharmaceutical industry." This is a goal that I wholeheartedly support.

That being said, the story of problems at Toyota has been circulating for a couple of years. Year-end reports of 2006 brought out the story of the seemingly large decrease in inventory turns for Toyota. IEs will recognize this as a classic warning sign. Perhaps classic warning signs do not even apply under TPS. I don't know enough yet to offer an opinion.

This article left me no better informed about what is going on at Toyota. The premise set forth in the subtitle was that it was going to address "quality and sales setbacks." However, most of the quotes and text did not do that. In fact, there were very few facts applied to this question: What is the nature of the reliability problem?

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As a consumer of IE content I continue to believe that there are a number of powerful and critical topics that could be addressed in this area. TPS seems to work when individual work cultures are very well-integrated with manufacturing response to customer needs.

"Jumping on a TPS bandwagon" is exceptionally difficult if the jumper is not willing to undergo this management challenge. That is why Toyota was very safe in allowing GM people into their plant. Toyota's bet seemed to be that GM and others would fail to capitalize on that opportunity because they would fail the management challenge, not the engineering challenge.

My mother was often heard to say "May you live in interesting times" (an old Chinese curse). This is an interesting time to have an IE mindset. Keep it up.

Stephen Puryear

Emeryville, Calif.

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