Toyota's employees feel the squeeze

JAPAN: THE PRINCIPAL of kaizen, or continuous improvement, has been taken to extreme levels by Toyota management. Once, an engineer would take a bullet train for the 100-minute journey from the company's factory in Nagoya to a business meeting in Tokyo. Now, the penny-pinching culture at the corporation means squeezing into a car with two colleagues for a four-hour gridlock trek to the capital.

Toyota, like all global carmakers, is under pressure to cut costs and no expense-account trip is being spared - whatever the inconvenience to its workforce. In this case, the saving for sending its three executives on the eight-hour round trip to the capital amounts to just 3,000 yen or around €25.

And the quest for small savings at the carmaker doesn't stop there.

A Toyota employee realised that the company could save a couple of euro each time if workers visiting headquarters walked to the farthest exit of Nagoya Station for a taxi, instead of the exit outside the turnstile. Now, this has become official company policy.

Fuelling this parsimony is the fact that Toyota now faces its first operating loss in seven decades and company president Katsuaki Watanabe is leading an "emergency profit" committee charged with trimming fat.

Initiatives include redesigning the electrical systems of cars to use fewer computer chips and scaling back on contract workers.

The kaizen culture, together with the strong bonds that come from the promise of lifelong employment, mean that workers are happy to come up with their own cost-saving initiatives.

Staff at the Tokyo office, for example, have readily agreed to shut down the elevator to save energy costs and use the stairs instead.

Subscriptions to newspapers and magazine have also been slashed.

Transferring that mindset to overseas facilities has been a more difficult challenge for the corporation as the company has extending its manufacturing operations to countries such as the US and Thailand.

A global production centre in Japan was established in recent years to teach the Toyota way to non-Japanese workers.