Toyota's Creative Idea Suggestion System makes work more fun and interesting. This time, we look at a team improvement effort aimed at creating a workplace where everyone can play an active role.
“I think this is probably the right color...”
For Yusuke Ano of the Frontier Research Center’s R-Frontier Division, uncertainty over wire colors had long been part of the job. Since childhood, he has had trouble distinguishing certain colors, and that sometimes left him unsure whether he had the right wire in front of him.
People do not all perceive color in the same way. For some, brown and red can be hard to distinguish; for others, gray and pink.
According to the Japan Ophthalmologists Association, color vision differences affect around one in 20 Japanese men and one in 500 Japanese women.
Differences in color perception should not stand in the way of doing the job. So, Ano and his teammates set out to solve a problem one of their own was facing. What emerged was a tool that displays wire colors as text.
He wasn’t the only one with that concern
In the R-Frontier Division, Ano works on the development of ELEY, a physical AI robot designed to learn human movement.
One step in the development process is harness production: creating the wiring that runs throughout the robot. These vital components function much like blood vessels and nerves in the human body.
The work involves four steps: cutting the wires, crimping the metal terminals, attaching the connectors, and carrying out a quality check.
At every stage, workers had to match wires color-coded in red, blue, green, and other colors against the instruction sheets. Until then, those checks were done entirely by eye.
ELEY uses 10 wire colors in total, each assigned a different role so it can be identified at a glance. In practice, though, it was not always that simple.
“For me, pink and gray can be difficult to tell apart,” says Ano.
He was not alone. His boss, Senior Expert Junya Morimoto, faced the same difficulty. Morimoto not only worked on harness production himself, but also checked finished work against the instructions.
Out of the 10 colors, white and black posed no problem. But depending on the environment, combinations such as red and brown or red and green could be hard to tell apart. Because the division was not handling mass production, the two had gotten by simply asking others when they were unsure.
That changed at the start of 2023, when an increase in prototype production meant more harness work was on the way.
As the need grew for as many people as possible to take on the work without anxiety, it became clear that the same challenge was shared by both those building the harnesses and those checking them. It was also about creating a workplace where everyone could contribute fully. They decided to tackle it through QC Circle activities.
With Ano as theme leader and Morimoto as circle leader, the 11-member team set out to build what at first looked like a mysterious black box.