The Toyota way comes down to five key manufacturing principles: Challenge, Kaizen (improvement), Genchi Genbutsu (go and see), Respect and Teamwork.
The Toyota setup
- A considerable number of custom systems on global basis
- Cisco for networking
- Shares its server business between IBM and Dell on an Intel base
- SAP ERP platform with Oracle database is housed on an IBM P570, which has just been upgraded from a P590
- Windows PC environment
- Novell for file and print
- Virtualised using VMware
- Java for internal software development
- Outsourced its data centre to Fujitsu Australia — production data centre in Melbourne and a disaster recovery data centre in Sydney
- NEC for network and comms
- IBM for desktop support
- 4571 employees
- 87 IT staff and about 30 contractors