At the heart of Toyota Kirloskar Motor’s sprawling 432-acre Bidadi factory on the outskirts of Bengaluru, the Japanese carmaker’s trademark “milkrun” inbound logistics model is in full flow. The model essentially replicates a traditional version of household milk bottle deliveries – wherein the company organises its key suppliers into clusters based on geographic location, parts are picked up from them by trucks on a “milk route” and then finally delivered via cross-docks to the Toyota plants on a ‘just-in-time’ basis to ensure near perfection in synchronising shipment inflows to production schedules.
The model, with its ‘small lots, frequent deliveries’ concept, finally culminates on the assembly line, where each of these small parts are progressively integrated into the larger body frame or key components of the car, and has endured for the better part of the last half-a-century as an intrinsic part of the world’s largest carmaker’s much-vaunted Toyota Production System (TPS). But this part-by-part assembly aggregation model now has an external challenge that threatens to fundamentally upend the way the factory floor processes that Toyota has perfected and other automakers have progressively emulated.
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