Over the past year, commercial vehicle manufacturers have
already taken numerous measures to adapt to the economic turmoil,
by laying off of temporary workers, reducing shifts and cutting
back working hours among other steps. Soon, further-reaching
measures may have to be taken to adjust to lower output levels.
"The commercial vehicle industry is facing the prospect of
having to make fundamental changes to its operations,"
according ACEA - European Automobile Manufacturers' Association
(2009).
Because of these facts the automobile world is each day more
interested in Toyota industry development, while European and
American automobile industry are in decadence, Toyota had
accumulated profits every year during ten years until 2007. The
Toyota wastes reducing methods, productivity and quality finished
imposing his production administration system to the worldwide
automobile industries.
One big difference between occidental thinks' and Toyota
production system, is that they works strongly inside people
management, teaching the employees to solve small problems,
avoiding in this way the big ones, increasing the final product
quality.
In this paper, will be presented a real case of quality
improvement applied directly on production floor in an automobile
Brazilian industry. The studied company manufactured this specific
vehicle model in Brazil to be exported to Europe.