If you don't have process gates, your end result probably sells more due to marketing and hype (looking at you, Ford and GM muscle cars and pickups).
Of course besides gates (Andon cord, kanban) they have other processes: autonomation, poka-yoke, production leveling, kaizen, 6S, etc. But gates keep production in check, and must be efficient, and part of a continuous improvement cycle.
Toyota ships same cars over and over. You can't copy the output of a factory worker, but you can copy the output of a software engineer.
Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker.
Elsewhere in the thread I reference Team Software Process (TSP) which is a development methodology that uses feedback to continuously improve the development process in a way that's very similar to manufacturing methods. I've done it; it works.
And using feedback to improve process is not specific to any industry. You don't need to learn from Toyota to understand that feedback is valuable.
Well, no, they don't, and this is the point: they are constantly refining every car model. They are always fixing bugs in the active production line, working on new features, and every year ship new "major and minor versions" of each model.
Toyota USA ships these models: Corolla, Camry, Avalon, Mirai, GR86, Supra, Sienna, Tacoma, Tundra, Sequoia, Highlander, Venza, C-HR, RAV4, Corolla Cross, 4Runner, bZ4X. For each of those there are 2-6 different trims. Assuming an average of 4 trims, that is 2,380 different configurations of vehicles. Each trim can also have optional components added or removed to customize each vehicle, increasing combinations further. A US Toyota factory worker may support tens of thousands of ways to assemble a car, and those ways change every day.
> Even if you ship CRUDs all day long, it's still very different from a factory worker.
Sure, but even a factory worker is different from a factory worker. The demands are different, the customers, compliance, tolerances. You can't treat them all the same. But some basic principles of managing companies, people, work, etc, can be applied to all of them. Waste is bad. Quality is good. Stopping to fix something once is better than stopping to fix it 20 times.
The impact of a factory issue is often much greater, more expensive, and harder to fix, than that of a software issue. But software workers can learn a lot about quality and efficiency from how well-run factories are managed. That idea gave birth to Lean Software Development (a subset of Agile).
Do these refinements face process gates though? Because that's a better mapping to software.
And perhaps they do---but I highly doubt it's as many as the cars themselves face.
Do you really believe what I meant is that Toyota ships one model, "The Toyota"?
> They are always fixing bugs in the active production line, working on new features
And people who do that are typically not described as "factory workers".
> Sure, but even a factory worker is different from a factory worker
They are the same in a sense that you can usually add more workers when you need to ship faster. Fred Brooks wrote a book explaining why the same mindset doesn't work in software.
Programmers are not workers sitting on the belt and assembling the same software over and over, they are creative persons who have to take lots of decisions.
There are checks everywhere. Pre-checks at the beginning of the supply process, checks that the supplies are valid, checks during manufacturing, checks during assembly, checks post-production. The value chain must continue to flow freely and continuously, and any bottleneck must be found and dealt with immediately, anywhere in the flow.
During the entire lifecycle of producing the car, there are gates for both quality and waste. You can't get quality if you have waste, because waste leads to defects, which you have to fix, which takes more time and money, and exponentially destroys your productivity & product.
Process gates are necessary to eliminate waste and increase quality. You have to immediately fix the things the gates catch, and continuously improve the process of fixing them, until identifying and fixing problems becomes fast and natural.
So process gates are a good thing - IF you actually follow Lean, and are actively working to improve your process. Most people know jack shit about Lean because the company didn't give a shit about training their employees, so their employees suck, and don't improve the process. Toyota, however, does train their employees, and so the employees follow this process, and the result are the most reliable cars at competitive prices.
If you are resolved to just have shitty people and not train them, then sure you can remove process gates. And you will churn out lots of cars. But those cars will be shitty, just like American cars from the 50s-90s. You'll need to spend a lot more to fix all the defects, and customers will be unhappy. If that's fine with you, cool! You're pushing out cars! Progress! But let's not pretend process gates are evil just because we don't want to learn to use them properly.