Toyota's Fall From Grace

Although the theory of continuous improvement and six sigma are sound practices to analyze a business state it is imperative to understand the balance between profitability and the cost of poor quality. It seems that Toyota has fallen of the edge of the fence after initially being on the greener side. There comes a point that business decisions will prevail in order to keep investors happy after you have six sigma'd your manufacturing and design to death. Although, there is a good argument that DFSS and NPD should never get stale. Congress may want to investigate the debacle around the "oh it's the floor mats" but the other side to that coin is who would accept such a flimsy root cause analysis - clearly I would not and neither would many other engineers well versed in RCA.
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