Need for TQC with Toyota Production System (TPS)

Toyota has become a synonym for quality, and one would find "Lean" related activities borrowed from the TPS all over the place. 

However, one needs to be cautious while adopting TPS just because you want to improve the quality. 

One of the key TPS tools to enhance the quality is "Stop and Fix." As soon as any worker sees a defect, one would stop the line, get everyone involved, fix it before the root-cause analysis. Of course, this is a no-brainer to support how TPS could help to improve the quality.

Here is the primary challenge, for a worker to "see the defect," he/she needs to be trained to identify all sorts of defects. However, Toyota also has admitted that not all of their workers have the ability to catch defects and so, they have implemented TQC in place.

IT organizations trying to adopt the TPS ideas to improve quality should ensure that they have some system in place enabling the employees to identify the defects, without which TPS will be another toolkit.