Toyota recently took over the world #1 spot from GM, and in 2008 they want to sell an ambitious 10.4 million units which would put them well ahead of the pack.
We've all heard of the Toyota Way, the company's management philosophy. Toyota's production system receives the most focus, but a very big part of their success is their attention to detail, and how they communicate with and train employees in Toyota best practices.
Toyota thinks this is especially vital as they enter a new stage of growth and continue to expand across the world:
“It’s extremely important to have the same common Toyota Way infiltrated to employees in all corners of the world,” said Katsuaki Watanabe, the company’s president. “But on the other hand, in each corner of the world, in each region, there are inherent characteristics that need to be respected.” (New York Times).
That's why Toyota is putting a big focus on training centers: they currently have one in Motomachi, Japan, another in Kentucky, USA, and are planning more.
At their Motomachi plant, 3,000 assembly line tasks have been translated into video manuals, showing "everything from the correct way to hold a screw to the best way to hold an air gun so that a worker’s hand will not tire in a few hours".
Of course Toyota is not immune to falling labor costs in low-cost countries such as China and India. And at the same time, Toyota takes care of its own. As NYT explains:
"... new ideas do not apply only to the trainees. At Toyota’s Tsutsumi plant, which builds the hybrid-electric Prius, Toyota has overhauled the way it delivers parts to the assembly line. The top floor of the plant, built in 1970, has been emptied and turned into a sprawling parts warehouse.
Workers on the plant floor used to choose the parts they needed to install on each vehicle from bins next to the assembly line. Now, a crew of workers upstairs loads the required parts into containers. The bins are placed inside the empty car bodies. Workers need only reach for the appropriate parts. After use, the bins are collected and sent upstairs to be refilled. The process... has cut Tsutsumi’s labor costs by 20 percent, said Osamu Ushio, general manager for the final assembly division, for two reasons.
First, cutting out the need to pick out parts shortened the training time for temporary workers, who make up one-third of the work force at Tsutsumi.
Second, older Japanese workers who are guaranteed lifetime employment by Toyota but can no longer handle the physical tasks of building cars can shift to loading containers.
That allows Toyota to deploy younger workers, often the temporary ones, who can work faster than their elders at lower wages. They earn about two-thirds of what permanent workers do, or as little as $10.50 an hour, with few benefits. Said Mr. Ushio: “We have to adapt to the changing environment.”
