Page 209 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

had always been [was] a very open-minded company, . . . listen-
ing to customers.”
To rebuild the necessary attention to putting customers first,
in June and July 2010, Akio Toyoda’s special committee on qual-
ity established “Customer First” training centers in Japan, North
America, Europe, Southeast Asia, and China to provide team
members with additional training on how to integrate customer
needs and feedback into their problem-solving and design pro-
cesses more effectively. This is not a minor investment. Toyota an-
ticipates that in addition to full-time quality professionals, who will
go through a three-year training program, more than 300,000 Toy-
ota employees globally will receive 8 to 16 hours of training in the
Toyota culture, TPS, TBP, and quality procedures and practices.
The quality division in Japan has created this awareness
training and the deeper three-year advanced training program for
quality professionals. The professional training goes into great
detail about how to inspect a vehicle and what to look for in each
specific area of the vehicle. The first center and the original ma-
terials were set up in Japan, but a training center was being estab-
lished in each region at the time of this writing, for example, in
Ann Arbor, Michigan, for North America. By Toyota standards,
it would normally take a seasoned quality professional two years
of training to be a certified trainer, but the development team
worked to kaizen the process down to one year. That’s still an
exceptionally long training process relative to other companies’
quality programs, which typically involve two to four weeks of
training. It illustrates the high standards and unusual commit-
ment to training and developing people in Toyota.
To accelerate the awareness process, Akio Toyoda led an ef-
fort to create a small paperback guide entitled “Our Attitude.”
It is based on 10 attitudes drawn from the Toyota Way that are

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