Toyota Production System Consultants, TPS Expert

Bob Bennett
President and Executive Consultant

Let me share a little more of my background in Total Quality Management (TQM) and Lean:

Throughout my career, I have placed a high value on maintaining a collaborative relationship with my Japan Staff coordinators who bring years of Toyota experience from Japan. Having grown up in the Toyota that won the Deming Prize for TQC application in 1965, they have practiced TQC since their first days at the company that applies Customer First and PDCA to absolutely everything it does.

When I ran Toyota's U.S. service organization as a corporate manager in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we actively worked with our Japan staff's support to practice PDCA in our decision making. This was applied to developing and managing a new warranty system, service merchandising programs, our Customer Relations Department, development of dealer service technician training and certification programs and management of vehicle technical quality issues.

When I led the development and launch of Toyota's North American Supplier Development Outreach Program in the late 1980s as corporate manager of the new U.S. Products Department, I dispatched a bilingual engineer to work inside Toyota in Japan for 15 months to learn the methods and skills we needed to deploy in our purchasing, engineering and quality management organization that fed the Celica convertible, accessories, maintenance parts and commercial truck bodies that generated over $600 million revenue for TMS. Our engineer spent 9 months in the Toyota Motor Corporation TQC (=TQM) Promotion Division, and another 6 months in the engineering department of the Tahara Plant, learning the processes for bringing new products and components from the Design Department into efficient, high quality mass production. This know-how was then deployed in our organization through training courses delivered by our new expert, as well as on-the-job coaching.

In a joint effort with the Juran Institute, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE, whose mission is to continue deployment of TQC in Japanese industry, government and other institutions), the general manager of the TQC Promotion Division, our TMC-trained engineer and Japan staff, we developed a week long TQM seminar for the top management of our suppliers and members of our organization. This was followed by ongoing training and application in our department and our suppliers' companies.

This initiative was followed in 1988 by our learning and deploying TPS to our suppliers, again in a collaborative fashion with Toyota's best experts. We first worked with Toyota's first North American plant, a brownfield purchased in 1973 and converted to produce truck beds for our compact pickup trucks. I had hired a seasoned production manager from this plant four years previously, and he took us to the plant to use their TPS training materials and observe TPS in action. (The entire management team of this plant spent one week describing their Lean journey and explaining their Lean and QC activities and operations.) Our Japan staff and the engineer we trained in Japan provided additional support. We took this knowledge and completed two successful pilot projects to demonstrate our basic knowledge and commitment to our senior Japanese management. They, in turn, supported our negotiations with the TMC director in charge of Toyota's Operations Management Consulting Division, the group responsible for deploying TPS throughout the Toyota supplier organization in Japan. He dispatched one of his most capable managers/Lean experts (who now makes almost $2 million a year transforming Delphi operations in Europe) and Dr. Toyoda's son, Akio, (then an assistant manager of OMCD and now rumored to be the next president of TMC) to coach us through a Lean implementation at one of our key suppliers, which was a huge success (the $50 million privately-owned supplier has become a $4 billion powerhouse in the automotive industry).

I followed this assignment as vice president and general manager of Vehicle Processors, Inc., a TMS subsidiary. Applying Lean TQM to our management of this business and the operations installing an average of $220 worth of accessories on finished vehicles, processing over 1 million vehicles per year for delivery to dealers, and a private trucking fleet, we improved from a $500,000 loss to $10,000,000 profit in two years.

I was promoted to Group Vice President and Officer of TMS USA and appointed General Manager to lead the development of Toyota's new $3 billion, 1600 person North American Parts Logistics Division. TQM was part of our core curriculum and business culture in transforming the old 600 employee parts supply department into Toyota's leader of seven North American distributors, procurement of service parts and accessories from 535 North American suppliers, global logistics and direct supply support to 1500 Toyota, Lexus and Industrial Equipment dealers. We spent eight months with the senior management team of the division, our Japan staff (with a collective 80 years of experience in Toyota) and the National Manager I assigned to HR development and training to establish the Toyota Business Culture in North America developing our TQM program and training curriculum. I participated in writing or reviewing every page and slide of our materials, attended the full 4-day training with my leadership team, completed my own individual TQM project and A3, participated in teaching many of the courses to other associates, led the formal reviews of each manager's TQM A3 report, attended every annual Kaizen Conference to review presentations and provide constructive feedback to the participants, and many other leadership and motivational activities. By the time I retired, over 1200 associates had been trained in TQM and over 700 had been certified at TQM Level II for demonstrated TQM implementation. We were achieving nine implemented suggestions per employee per year--the highest in TMS by several multiples.

A similar effort was put into developing our TPS/Lean curriculum training and deployment in our own organization and throughout our supply chain. Our best warehouse facilities were ranked by our TMC Japan experts as the best in the world. Our supply chain delivered the industry's best service and fill rate to our dealers in the shortest lead-time, with over 50% lower inventory, and 50% higher labor productivity in our warehouse operations than our competitors. Constantin, part of this is manufacturing and distribution operations. But a major and even more significant part was the application of Lean TQM to our connection with our dealers, distributors suppliers and logistics partners; inventory control; customer service; data processing; demand management; strategy and objectives deployment and management; human resources hiring, development and management; sales policies and practices; reverse logistics; accounting; product development; new model launch support processes and other areas important to customer satisfaction and loyalty for revenue growth, high quality, short lead-time, low costs, higher profits, and lower capital investments.

Since retiring seven years ago, I have dedicated a significant amount of time to network with like-minded Toyota alumni to document explicitly the implicit Lean TQM business culture that is the key to making LTQM effective and long-lasting in any enterprise. We call this the Human System for Lean Management, and it is giving great leverage to our consulting results.

If all this seems extreme, it should. Lean TQM is my passion, for it has been my mission to contribute to Toyota's successful globalization by learning the Toyota business culture and effectively deploying it in the business units I managed in North America and the partner organizations I influenced. My greatest satisfaction comes from the enriching of the lives of the people in our organizations who do the work--especially those on the front lines who are most dependent on their leaders for the survival of their company and their jobs.