Toyota readies new efficiency drive

It has been a little over six months since Naomi Ishii took charge of Toyota’s operations in India. During this time, he has been busy creating a new ecosystem encompassing the company as well as its dealers and suppliers.

“It has been a good learning experience,” the 48-year-old Managing Director of Toyota Kirloskar Motor told Business Line. The last six months have seen Ishii focusing on enhancing operations and ushering in a new mindset among employees and the supply chain.

The core of this process is Toyota’s culture of continuous improvement or kaizen. “If you are not able to visualise the problem or challenges, you cannot promote Kaizen. I try to be fair, transparent and consistent and this has been helpful in finding invisible problems,” Ishii says.

This is an acknowledgement that super-efficient operations are imperative if Toyota has to be sustainable in India. “As MD, what is important is that each function can carry out its own role definition. What I need to do is to arrive at the timings and key performance indicators to ensure better output,” Ishii says.

This, according to him, is the core of Toyota where there are strong functional operations and a lot of cross-functional interaction. “What I have learnt in the last six months is how competitive Indians are as individuals. I can set my employees clear targets and they can meet the challenge. All I need to do is ensure interaction between teams and functions,” Ishii says.

Through Kaizen, there was a “strong effort” to reduce stocks of parts and products by increasing production capability to meet demand. This helped Toyota realize lean stock operations and minimise space in the spare parts warehouse. Today, its monthly stock for parts in dealers is just 15 days compared to an average of 2-3 months for most carmakers. Inner changes

Enhancing operations was a top priority for Ishii soon after he got into the driver’s seat. A case in point is the test marketing of the Etios Cross. “Before we launched the Cross, we did a customer survey to check how the market would perceive the product. We found new things and some changes helped boost orders,” he says.

Likewise, the EM60 initiative which assures service in just 60 minutes has now been extended to maintenance facilities in Delhi and Bangalore. Plans are underway to expand the footprint across India. Clearly, EM60 is doing the trick and (customer) traffic has increased leading to higher satisfaction levels. The efforts are paying off with Toyota taking over the top slot in the Altis segment as well as the Fortuner and Innova over the last two months. In June, following a year of its launch, the Camry followed suit.

“One by one, I want to expand where we can be Number 1 whether it is market share, service content etc,” Ishii says. Eventually, the objective is to satisfy customers with product power and content of service accompanied by the human touch.

The immediate challenge now is to get the Etios back on track quickly. “It is three years since it was launched and we keep improving the product and performance by listening to the voice of the customer. Whenever we get advice, we open our eyes and ears,” Ishii says. Today, he is far more confident that customers are happy with the Etios, evident from its growing numbers. The optimism also stems from the fact that products like the Qualis faced flak for their design but still got kudos for quality, ride and comfort.

The key, according to him, is to enhance product power and top-class levels of service like EM60 to create a new “customer revolution”. Once this is in place, the next step is to bring advanced technologies. “We can then create the brand more powerfully and may be able to introduce the new era in the B segment,” Ishii says.

According to him, it is important to go the extra mile as a good corporate citizen which means addressing problems such as safety, energy security and environment issues.

“We have to be a partner for the India of the future. Ultimately, in order for Indians to run this company in the future, we need to realise the winning solution for Toyota and the Government as well as the customer,” Ishii declares.

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