Day 2: Toyota and Aisin

Our day started early with a train trip to Nagoya which is deemed the "Toyota Capital of the World." I was surprised to learn that Toyota got its start as a looming and weaving business. The founder of Toyota's family name is Toyoda. There are two stories about why the name was changed to Toyota. One is that the family wanted the company to be more community focused and not only linked to the family. The other is that it was a marketing decision because Toyota with the "t" is easier to pronounce and write.

From their initial establishment in 1926 Toyota has grown to a worldwide corporation with $18 billion in net sales. And now of course their main focus is in the production of automotive parts and vehicles including material handling equipment which accounts for 40% of their business. They produced their first car in 1956.

From Nagoya we headed to Takahama and another Toyota manufacturing facility. The remarkable thing about the train trip was the interspersed rice fields with tall buildings and manufacturing facilities.

At the manufacturing facility at Takahama we learned how the process differs from our processes in the U.S. The Japanese celebrate finding a problem. Their focus is then to work together to fix it. They meet and talk every day about any problems that the workers are finding. They use what is called a Kizan Structure which means that they focus on the bottom-up not the top-down. All workers provide feedback about what can be done better. They then build strategies around the ideas that make sense. Their focus is on team goal setting and accountability to meet the goals.

One thing they pointed out to us is that when Japanese return a product that has a defect they don't want to be told "go pick out another one." They want to understand how the defect happened and what the company has done to fix it.

From here we headed to Aisin an affiliate of Toyota. We met with several key executives and board members. The chairman of the board is someone from the Toyoda family. Aisin manufacturers transmissions, brakes, cooling and lubrication systems, door frames and latches, and car navigation systems. They have 8 locations in Indiana and employ 3,510 people statewide.

Our last stop of the day was the Toyota plant in Tsutumi. This is an amazing place that produces 2 cars every minute. We saw them build a Toyota Camry. The facility uses a great deal of automation and robotics technology for the assembly. Unlike some of the manufacturing processes in the U.S. they don't build just one type of car. They can build different models one right after the other. There is great attention to accuracy. If there is uncertainty workers can turn on a light and others will come to evaluate the situation to determine if the quality is acceptable.

At the end of a long day I kept thinking about all the times I had heard them play the song "It's a Small World After All." It was a favorite tune for all of our tours, but perfect in a way to describe what we learned about the relationships that exist between the Japanese and the residents of Indiana.