Leading a quality revolution
Roberto Priolo: Mr. Nomura, thank you for your time. Can you briefly tell us about your incredible career?
Sadao Nomura: Of course. I was at Toyota for a total of 37 years. I spent the first 17 years at Toyota Motor Sales and another 20 years at Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC). During my time at TMC, I provided kaizen support to Toyota Indonesia, Toyota Australia and Toyota South Africa.
After leaving Toyota in 2002, I was President of Technol Eight - a parts supplier to TMC. In 2006, I was invited to join Toyota Material Handling as Senior Advisor. My role was to lead quality improvement activities. I was at TMHC for 10 years.
RP: Throughout your career, you have worked on both the automaker side and the supplier side. What can you tell us about Toyota's approach to supporting its suppliers?
SN: Toyota organizes special workshops for its suppliers, aimed at engaging them until they fully understand the Toyota Production System. The company also invites supplier representatives to take part in operations at a Toyota plant, so that they can fully understand the work from the customer's point of view. In this way, they can experience the work first-hand and see how their own work impacts their customer.
RP: In your experience, what makes training successful?
SN: An instructor must teach and train with passion and always strive to build a good personal relationship with the trainee. I also believe it is important for people to learn at work - on the job (dojos are fundamental for this) and to understand the problems that can arise from their mistakes. This increases their sense of responsibility. It is also crucial that an instructor follows up with their trainees until they master the job.
RP: Can you tell us more about your work to improve quality at Toyota Material Handling?
SN: In my opinion, quality kaizen is the simplest way to approach lean. However, it requires a deep commitment from senior leaders to continuously teach and guide their people until they feel confident in their ability to produce a defect-free product. It is a constant effort, something I did for 10 years – for example, by issuing 300 "Nomura" A3s to teach and guide all of Toyota Material Handling's plants. It paid off, because in all the companies I managed during that decade we were able to reduce quality defects by more than 90%. (Healthy competition between the different areas of the organization around the world played an important role.)
It took a while to get there: in the first year, my approach consisted of giving immediate feedback to the team leaders responsible for a defect and using a visual system to make problems evident, but that did not work. People were too busy and could not keep up with my teaching. So I refocused efforts on the fundamentals of the Toyota Way and on what I called Quality Dantotsu activity. Dantotsu means doing kaizen consistently, constantly and completely, until the problem disappears forever. For me, a countermeasure is only truly a countermeasure when the defect is never repeated.
RP: In your experience, what is the best way to retain talent?
SN: You have to constantly challenge people! Give them the opportunity to use their skills in different ways and, as soon as they progress, present them with another challenge. It is essential not to keep people in the same position for too long. Send them to a new area or give them a new position. It was the same for me: as a young engineer, I was challenged to work on a variety of things and learned a lot in the process. Just knowing is nothing. You must do!
RP: It's not every day we have the opportunity to talk to a Toyota veteran like you. Could you share some reflections on what made Toyota so incredibly successful?
SN: From the moment it began producing cars in 1935, Toyota competed with General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. At the time, this was almost impossible for an automaker with low volumes (when I joined in 1965, Toyota produced 500,000 cars a year) and poor quality. In the decades between the 1950s and the 1980s, Toyota understood that it would only be able to compete with the Big Three on price by reducing waste and, with it, costs. Being profitable was the problem that led Ohno to create the Toyota Production System.
This struggle forced Toyota to be creative, to find ways to reduce costs, improve quality and grow. In the 1980s, the company gained confidence in the quality of its cars and in its ability to take on the American automakers. That was when it expanded overseas: the NUMMI joint venture was launched and the Kentucky plant was opened. Toyota's top managers and engineers visited competitors' plants, carefully analyzed their current state and found a lot of muda. This gave the company the confidence boost it needed to make the leap.
