Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hkmurakami | Hacker News Reader

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There are two distinct groups involved here.

First, there is a specific role in Toyota group companies with the title "Production Engineering", which is tasked with creating/improving/redesigning/etc. the production process of particular products, new and old. They are the most important category of engineers hired as undergrad and masters engineering graduates, and everyone knows that they are the group best positioned for career advancement through the engineering side of the company. The exact title is "Seisan Gijyutsu 生産技術". If you see a Toyota group company CEO with an engineering background, chances are he came up through this division.

Second are the "craftsmen" who are typically HS grads from the Aichi area, sometimes from Toyota branded schools. They are the ones with the deft touch and individual skill that are often lauded in these western oriented articles.

It's only when you have both sides working together that you will have scalable, transferrable progress.

disclosure: I worked at a Toyota group company as a new grad in Aichi and spent 3 months in the factory as part of my training.

That's a good point.

Here in silicon valley, the best performing companies are rarely the ones who have only engineering talent. A good engineer often lacks domain experience in the space they are trying to innovate in. It is important to find and work with those who have domain experience in order to progress quickly.

Thanks for pointing this out. :)

The appropriate analogy for silicon valley would be if your programming rockstars were not the same people as your architectural rockstars and neither had more than the most basic experience in the other area. Imagine if you had a bunch of people who could theorycraft a great system really well but didn't understand much past hello world, and you had some really amazing programmers who could code just about anything efficiently but didn't understand system architecture.

Without those two areas working together and understanding each other, you end up with a broken system. This is precisely the sitaution that you face in mechanical design + mechanical manufacture.

I am a mech engineer by profession and it's critical for me to engage early and often with the tradestaff who manufacture my items, so that they can guide me. I'll understand the design fundamentals far better than they will, but equally they'll understand the tooling and production processes that it's necessary to respect.

I can propose a design that will work, but they're the ones hwo can make it result in half the material wasteage with a few tweaks. If I can ensure that such aspects are successfully incorporated into the design then the part is better than either of us could achieve individually.

In reality, the programming/IT side of things tends to blur and you tend to have quite significant experience in both areas, so the problem is less pronounced. It's far more distinct in the mechanical world.

This is a great perspective.

You've done a pretty detailed analysis of the company process.

So is the Production Engineer "Seisan Gijyutsu" focused on finding improvements for the Craftsmen to develop or does the Production Engineer "Seisan Gijyutsu" develop the improvements and teach them to the craftsmen?

I would suspect that the engineers theorise what can be done and produce a small scale demonstration and then the craftsmen take the concept and refine it into something that's reproducible at scale too.

The production engineer is there to optimize the production line - this is where Iso9000 and BS5750 really come into their own.

eg if i replace this machine tool with x% scrap/rework rate with a new one that has y% and the new machine costs Z$ million - how long does it take to payback.

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