Toyota's Takaoka #2 Line: The Most Flexible Line in the World
I don't doubt the line is much more efficient and flexible as claimed, but the article doesn't do a very good job explaining exactly how the gains are achieved beyond hand-waving about clever contraptions that are faster than robots and the ability to dynamically move stations around. It seems difficult to imagine that hordes of industrial engineers haven't done the calculations on each of these methods countless times at all car manufacturing companies. There must be deeper, more subtle factors that explain why Toyota's particular combination of techniques yields such superior results. Perhaps it's just the culmination of a lot of long-tail optimizations that only Toyota has had time and capital to let mature or maybe there really is just "one secret trick" that underpins it all - the article doesn't really give a good sense of what it might be. In either case it'd be interesting to see a detailed breakdown with numbers comparing the various lines with explanations for why particular decisions were or weren't made to truly understand why the system works so well.