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Toyota Motor Corporation, one of the largest manufacturer of automobiles in the world and the largest in Japan, produces more that 5.8 million vehicles a year. The corporation has 51 manufacturing companies in 26 countries producing Lexus and Toyota vehicles and components.

Each vehicle built by at Toyota progresses through three main production areas: the body plant, the painting plant and the assembly plant. The final assembly line, within the assembly plant, is where finishing items, such as the windshield, the seats, the tires and others, are installed in cars. This final assembly line is approximately one kilometer long; 200 operators work on the line. Most of the work done on this line is manual. The operators receive production instruction from the production instruction system for each vehicle. The operator confirms these instructions and then uses prior experience to select the appropriate parts and corresponding installation tools for the car. Finally, the operator manually begins the installation process by walking around the car and installing the different components. Each vehicle model requires different operation methods that the operator must learn, and all models are on the assembly line at once. For example, an operator may first work on a Camry, next a Sequoia and then a Celica.

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Over the past decade, the number of models that Toyota manufactures has increased, leading to increased complexity on the final assembly line. There are now 3000 basic operations performed on each vehicle as it rolls through the final assembly line. At many companies, this would have led to a drop in productivity and an increase in costs, but not at Toyota. Toyota is world-renowned for exceptional product quality and efficiency. As the complexity of the final assembly line grew, Toyota engineers realized that advanced automation of the assembly line would help the company maintain its leadership position.

Toyota turned to Gensym's G2 because of its ability to understand and reason over rapidly changing, complex processes, such as the final assembly line, and to then create an optimized plan for operations G2's ability to flexibly model operations through its software objects is valuable for capturing, applying, adding and modifying the knowledge needed to support these planning decisions. By deploying applications based on Gensym's G2, Toyota is helping their assembly planners create plans that best smooth production under the complexity of many different automotive models and production variables. The application quickly determines the most effective way to assign work throughout the assembly floor so there is a level work load across each area. Through smoother production, Toyota is able to further improve the productivity of their manufacturing operations.

“With our applications based on G2, we are making planning decisions at a consistently high level of quality so that we are as productive as possible”, said Tatsuhisa Ishii, a group manager with Toyota. “We are also able to make these decisions more frequently so that we can be more flexible in responding to unexpected changes in demands or availability of production resources.”

Toyota is currently using G2 applications in its Japanese facilities; have already deployed to U.S., Canada, U.K., France and Turkey; and are planning to deploy to other plants worldwide.