FEATURE – Visits to nearly 30 automotive plants across Japan and Germany reveal what truly separates good factories from exceptional ones—and the answer is surprisingly simple.

Words: Christoph Roser

Header photo by BMW Werk Leipzig and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany license

Over the past few years, I have had the unusual opportunity to visit nearly thirty automotive plants across Japan and Germany. I spent months traveling through Japan, visiting factories from Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Mazda, Subaru, Mitsubishi, and Suzuki. A few years later, I repeated the exercise in Germany, visiting BMW, Mercedes, Daimler Trucks, Volkswagen, Porsche, and Audi plants.

Some of these visits were quick tours, while others I repeated several times. I wanted to go beyond first impressions and collect actual observations from the shop floor, both qualitative and quantitative. My goal was to answer a simple question: what separates a good factory from a truly excellent one?

Like many people interested in operational excellence, I originally focused on Toyota. That is almost automatic in our lean circles: Toyota is the benchmark everyone studies. But after visiting so many plants, I came away with a more nuanced conclusion: Toyota is exceptional, but it is not alone. BMW, in my opinion, deserves to be mentioned in the same conversation.

What surprised me most during my visits was not simply the differences between companies, but the differences between factories that looked superficially similar. Most automotive plants today are clean, automated, highly engineered environments. Almost all of them use lean terminology and have visual boards, KPIs, and improvement initiatives. Yet, performance varies dramatically.

While on my visits, one of the exercises I tried was trying to estimate the percentage of time operators were actually performing value-adding work versus waste. I observed assembly lines directly, measuring whether workers were actively creating value or walking, searching, waiting, adjusting, or dealing with interruptions.

The results of my observation were striking: Toyota’s Tsutsumi plant reached almost 80% value-adding time in final assembly—an extraordinary number. Nissan also performed extremely well, but most factories were nowhere close to it. Interestingly, BMW was the exception, with its plants in Munich, Leipzig, and Dingolfing operating at almost the same level as Toyota.

This is important because it debunks a common misconception: that Lean and operational excellence are somehow “Japanese.” Many people believe Toyota succeeds because of Japanese culture, discipline, or national characteristics. BMW proves that is not true: the company achieves similar performance levels inside Germany, with German workers, German unions, and German management traditions.

So the question becomes: what are Toyota and BMW doing differently?

At first, I thought the answer might be automation or product mix. Perhaps faster lines naturally become more efficient. Indeed, I observed a correlation between shorter takt times and higher efficiency, with faster lines generally performing better.

But that was not enough to explain the gap. I also compared passenger vehicle plants and commercial vehicle plants. I expected truck factories to perform worse because of greater product variation. Surprisingly, once adjusted for line speed, the differences nearly disappeared. Then, I compared pre-assembly lines and final assembly lines. Again, no major difference.

But when I compared Japanese plants and German plants overall, there was a consistent gap: Japanese plants were roughly ten percentage points more efficient on average.

Even that comparison proved incomplete, because BMW stood out as an exception. BMW consistently performed at Toyota’s level.

That forced me to dig deeper. Eventually, I came to a conclusion that sounds almost deceptively simple: Toyota and BMW have much better work standards than most companies. Their standards are more detailed, more practical, more alive. Operators actually know them; supervisors use them. They are not dusty procedures sitting inside binders.

“Why are their work standards so much better?” I then asked myself. The answer, in my view, is kaizen—continuous, small, daily improvements.

At BMW, for example, work standards are improved astonishingly frequently: on average, once per week for every workstation. That is an incredible pace of improvement. Critically, these improvements are not driven by managers or industrial engineers, but by operators themselves (supported by supervisors).

This, to me, is where most organizations fundamentally misunderstand Lean. Many companies still treat improvement as a side activity: they create suggestion boxes, organize occasional workshops, and establish specialized lean departments responsible for improvement.

Toyota and BMW do something different: they embed improvement directly into normal daily work. Operators are expected to improve their work regularly, while supervisors are expected to coach and support that improvement regularly.

At BMW, supervisors themselves operate according to highly structured standard work. One example I observed involved supervisors reviewing a list of approximately twenty questions multiple times per day while walking the line. Questions about material placement, markings, ergonomics, abnormalities, organization.

Each day they improve at least one workstation together with an operator. With a typical supervisor overseeing around twelve operators, every operator receives direct improvement support regularly, often weekly. That means that every workstation evolves continuously, which creates incredibly fast learning cycles.

What makes this especially powerful is that it leverages the deepest source of operational knowledge in the factory: the operators themselves. After all, who understands a workstation better than the person performing the work eight hours per day?

Most companies dramatically underestimate this. Instead, they rely too heavily on managers, engineers, or consultants to design improvements. But managers do not have enough time, and they are often too far removed from the details of the work itself.

At both Toyota and BMW, systems are created where front-line knowledge continuously improves front-line work. This, to me, is the real secret behind the consistently superior results these two organizations achieve—a culture where daily improvement is expected, supported, and standardized.

Organizations still search for excellence through major transformations, expensive systems, or breakthrough innovations. But after visiting nearly thirty automotive plants, I came away convinced that excellence stems from the thousands of tiny improvements, made every day, by the people closest to the work.

_THE AUTHOR