Usually, the primary factor behind a carmaker halting production at a facility is a shortage of supplies. Other times, unexpected incidents or external events like extreme weather or cyber threats can lead to a production standstill. Yet, Toyota encountered a unique issue last month that forced it to cease operations at all its 14 domestic manufacturing plants in Japan.
Operations were temporarily suspended at some local factories starting with the first shift on August 29, and extended to 28 lines at all 14 plants by the evening of the same day. So, what led to this? On August 28, during scheduled maintenance work, things did not go as anticipated. Toyota states that although the data in the database was deleted and reorganized, the system came to a halt due to a lack of disk space.
Since all servers operated on a unified system, the backup mechanism also failed, making an automatic transition impossible. This left Toyota with no choice but to halt manufacturing at its various Japanese facilities. Operations restarted only after data was transferred to a different server with more storage space.
"We would like to apologize once again to our customers, suppliers, and related parties for any inconvenience caused by the suspension of our domestic plants as a result of the malfunction in our production order system at the end of last month." Toyota stated in a press release.
Work has since recommenced after resolving the glitch in the production scheduling system. Toyota assures that after pinpointing the issue, steps have been taken to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.
Source: Toyota
