The Toyota way comes down to five key manufacturing principles: Challenge, Kaizen (improvement), Genchi Genbutsu (go and see), Respect and Teamwork.
Agility
The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It’s looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development — where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer — Toyota has adopted an agile process.
This has let the IT department move into smaller development cycles with far greater customer input. This, Scott says, results in a continual release of components of systems and ends up being “shorter, cheaper, quicker and usually much more supported by the customer as it achieves what they want a lot more easily”.
“As an IT division, we are trying to introduce the Toyota production principles into our development process. So we are now introducing our production methodologies,” Scott says.
“We are trying to link the best production process there is and customise it for IT system development. We have done a couple of projects and they are probably the best IT projects this division has ever done. They had great business sponsorship and feedback from our business customers.”
Next: The planning lesson