Earlier this week, it was reported that Toyota had suffered a significant shutdown at 14 of its Japanese plants. But unlike the potential UAW industrial action that threatens to slow down U.S. car output, this delay in manufacturing was attributed to a computer “glitch” that prevented the firm from ordering new components rather than being workforce-related. In addition to Toyota, the glitch affected Daihatsu, Hino, and Lexus as well.
It’s understood that production has now resumed, but the shutdown has disrupted a system that is heavily reliant on the company’s much-lauded method of manufacturing. Toyota is often credited with developing the Just-In-Time (JIT) production system, which is a critical component of the Toyota Production System (TPS) or Lean Manufacturing.
While Toyota has not officially confirmed the reason for the shutdown, merely stating that it was not a cyber attack, Reuters reports that two people close to the situation said that the outage happened during a system update. A similar shutdown was enacted in 2022 when Kojima Industries, a supplier of plastic parts, revealed that one of its file servers had been infected with a virus.
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The loss of one day’s production comes at a rough time for the leadership of the company, with Koji Sata taking over as CEO from Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda in April. Sato has already had to contend with the revelation that affiliate Daihatsu had rigged safety tests for 88,000 small cars, many of which were also sold under the Toyota brand. And in May, Toyota said that the data of 2 million owners had been exposed due to a cloud-server configuration error.
Further bad timing comes as the company was ramping up production, with Japanese output up by 29 percent this year. For the first six months of 2023, it’s reported that Toyota produced 13,500 vehicles per day, making up a third of the company’s global production — a figure that excludes cars made by Daihatsu and Hino.
Based on an average global sale price per unit of $26,384, that means a single day’s lost production across its 14 Japanese factories could be the equivalent of $356 million in revenue.
