Toyota looks forward a year after making big Plano move
Auto giant says real work just getting started as employees from across America settle in
PLANO — A year ago, Toyota executives unveiled the auto giant’s new North American home, a 100-acre corporate wonderland in Plano, complete with thousands of square feet of work space designed for collaboration, a fitness center with a twostory climbing wall and 11 different places for employees to grab a meal.
At the time, Toyota’s North America CEO Jim Lentz described the grand opening as the end of a long journey, stretching back decades — long before the April 2014 day when the Japanese carmaker announced that it planned to leave its headquarters in Southern California and head to the Lone Star State.
But this week, executives said the real work is just getting started.
“We’ve now reached the starting line,” Chris Nielsen, Toyota Motor North America executive vice president, said on Monday.
The initiative known as “One Toyota,” which has aimed to merge Toyota’s far-flung North American operations under one proverbial roof, is just about a year old, which means that many of the theory’s biggest practical tests in a fast-evolving industry are likely still ahead.
Nielsen said that so much of the past year has been devoted to getting settled in the new digs.
In just four years, Toyota found a site for, designed and built a massive new campus — a construction job that was a feat in its own right.
Then there was the task of persuading about 2,800 employees to move, mostly from California, Kentucky and New York — about 70 percent of the combined total that were asked. Toyota has declined to break down how many workers moved from each place.
“The best money we spent was sponsoring a trip for team members and a spouse or significant other, just to come and see,” Nielsen said. “Some of the perceptions they had, perhaps, of tumbleweeds rolling down the main street were pretty quickly put aside.”
And then they actually had to move, which tends to throw a little extra chaos into employees’
lives.
Finally, Nielsen said, Toyota recently finished the bulk of its work hiring about 1,200 new people to fill a variety of roles. All that, he said, had to be accomplished while Toyota kept pace with a rapidly changing auto industry.
“The challenge was … doing all this on the run,” Nielsen said. “It’s not like you just stop the business of making and selling automobiles, and our industry continues to accelerate.”
Michelle Krebs, executive analyst for Autotrader, said that a sense of camaraderie spurred by moving into a new space will likely be helpful as the auto industry reaches a crossroads.
“There’s a lot of pressure on automakers,” she said. “The pie isn’t getting bigger, it’s getting smaller.”
That’s why Toyota has pushed to transform itself into a “mobility company,” including with its separately run firm, Toyota Connected, that’s also based in Plano.
Krebs said that by virtue of its sheer size, Toyota is “always at the forefront” of efforts to stay ahead of falling vehicle sales — and having mostly everyone in one place will keep the company nimble.
Nielsen said that One Toyota has already helped the company operate more efficiently.
Toyota’s manufacturing and corporate and financial operations have historically worked almost as separate companies. One Toyota was meant to change that.
Nielsen pointed to a move to streamline the way Toyota gets car parts from a network of about 500 suppliers to factories and to dealers, who use them in repairs. Before, they were totally separate efforts with different people planning different routes. Now, they’re integrated into a single logistics network.
“It’s all about getting people connected, it’s all about bumping into somebody in line for coffee, or walking through the hallways and remember you meant to ask them a question about something,” he said. “We were three time zones apart from the Midwest to California; it’s a challenging way to run a business.”
Decisions that might have taken six months in the past now take six days, he said.
That’s an exciting new reality for Kelly Stefanich, an almost 15-year Toyota employee working in marketing and communications. Previously, she was based at a Toyota factory in Indiana, but she worked with colleagues at 10 manufacturing facilities around the country.
“In the past, we had to set up a Skype meeting, hope they got to their email, then try to call them and you can’t see who’s there,” she said. “Face to face is always more advantageous.”
It’s easier to roll out new processes and communicate them clearly.
She said she’s also enjoying North Texas life — especially now that she and her husband are empty nesters.
They moved near the end of last year into a house in a Frisco subdivision, Stefanich said, where they’ve been pleasantly surprised by the diversity of their neighborhood and by just how much there is to do in the ’burbs.
“We thought we would have to go to Dallas to do some of the more cultural things that we can do in Frisco and Plano,” she said.