President Sato
Our initiatives focused on regaining fundamental carmaking strengths and extra capacity for taking on challenges, which I think were efforts to stop the bleeding, so to speak.
However, these efforts are now shifting to initiatives aimed at sowing seeds for the future.
Preventing recurrence of the certification issues has become an opportunity to accelerate workplace-rooted improvements, leading to initiatives to strengthen our company’s foundation, including its workplace climate.
In the voluntary TPS Jishuken for Certification Work initiative established by Chairman Toyoda, improvement activities for addressing essential issues are making progress by identifying waste and bottlenecks throughout all processes, from planning and development to production.
Centered on the Toyota Production System, we are rethinking in a future-oriented way how we work, aiming to shorten lead times. We intend to expand this action company-wide toward improving productivity.
Our plant members have tackled the medium-term to long-term challenges of a shrinking working population and young people turning away from manufacturing. While stepping up recruitment activities, we have improved workplace environments with efforts including measures to combat heat, creating production lines on which our diverse team members can work comfortably, and also by implementing our “Future Production Plants” project, which looks 50 years into the future.
When it comes to development as well, we are working to improve our carmaking productivity to continue to meet diverse needs.
Our “AREA35” activities, which are meant to accurately grasp customer needs and optimize specifications and component types, have improved development efficiency by the equivalent of three vehicle model redesigns on a trial basis in Japan.
Going forward, we intend to further improve our development and production efficiencies by expanding these activities globally.
We are working on establishing a system that will use digital transformation advances for seamlessly linking vehicle specification information from development to sales, which is currently correlated by people.
Working together with our suppliers and dealers, we intend to strengthen our operational base for the future and improve our earning power.