Toyota has vowed to shorten the lead time to get new products into showroom in the United States, citing improvements its made to its new North American headquarters in Plano, Texas and the organisational changes that it has made in relation to the move, according to WardsAuto.
“I think we’re going to be quicker to market. Before if you were part of the sales organization, you had your own legal team [and] HR team, so there was a lot of redundancy across the organization.
“So we were able to streamline that and, with a lot of the headcount changes, we were able to hire more engineers to [for] our operation in Ann Arbor, as we continue to develop vehicles here in North America, for North America,” said Toyota Motor North America (TMNA) CEO Jim Lentz, explaining the revised company structure that has eliminated organisational redundancy and bottlenecks.
The new campus combines the Japanese carmaker’s sales, marketing, finance, legal and manufacturing positions, previously split between California, Kentucky and New York locations. Meanwhile, the company’s engineering operations in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan has been expanded, featuring new facilities that have been added partly to house purchasing staff that have been relocated from Kentucky.
Toyota has long been working on getting more appealing, fun-to-drive vehicles to market in a shorter time – the Toyota New Global Architecture (TNGA), which already underpins the new Prius, C-HR and Camry, is designed to enable the strategic sharing of parts and powertrain elements, as well as to provide a lower centre of gravity that will allow for products with more attractive designs and better handling.
During the announcement of Toyota’s 2016 fiscal year results earlier in the year, president Akio Toyoda said that the company needed to work smarter, balancing its desire to make desirable cars with the need to reduce cost and lead times. “When it comes to making ever-better cars in a smart way, it is becoming apparent that there is still room for improvement,” Toyoda said.
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US dislike foreigner’s brand
Why don’t Toyota concentrate in bringing cars faster to ASEAN countries too? As well as bringing down prices?
After all, Japan colonised many countries in Asia and because of all the wealth it took from these countries, that is why Japan is all high and mighty.
Isn’t it time to repay back by giving cheaper cars to Asia?
Cars from Japan are taxed more. That’s why UMW only sell cars made in ASEAN. Unless there is tax incentive from the govt like for hybrid cars 5 yrs ago. One reason Lexus has high retail price compare to BMW and Merc of similar classes. Jaguar cars too (all CBU)
@ex-VGM staff, you are wrong. UMWT also sells Estima and Alphard imported directly (CBU) from Japan.
Toyota Moving Forward. Moving fast..more appealing, fun-to-drive cars
Toyota, Moving Uncles
Not any Uncles. Only uncles who know, appreciate & can afford to buy one(Camry)
While in My, moving backward.