05/13/03
By GINA HANNAH
Times Business Writer ginah@htimes.com
To the untrained eye, the inside of the new Toyota V-8 engine plant at North Huntsville Industrial Park looks like the typical automotive plant - a maze of steel cages, conveyors and computerized machines.
Then you hear the music.
The chimes ring out an exotic-sounding, Asian melody, which lasts for about a minute and then stops.
A few minutes later, the music starts again, but the tune is different. This time, it's "Camptown Races."
In the Toyota culture, this music is called "andon," a form of communication that allows production workers to get help from supervisors if they have a question or problem. The employee pulls a red or yellow cord and lights flash, music plays and a team leader knows there's something to address.
The songs get changed every so often, but supervisors, called team leaders, don't miss a beat.
"You get so used to it, that you hear what you have to hear," said Paula Lillard, general manager of the 400,000-square-foot plant.
Guests were treated to a good dose of Toyota culture Monday, as the $220 million plant celebrated its grand opening. About 300 production employees and a couple of hundred guests, including local and state officials and Toyota managers, gathered in the plant to unveil the first engine (actually made on April 2) to officially roll off the assembly line. Minutes later, the crowd cheered as a Tundra pickup truck powered by a Huntsville engine eased its way to the stage area.
"This is a historic day for the whole entire state of Alabama," Gov. Bob Riley said. The Huntsville plant, Toyota's first to produce V-8 engines outside Japan, will turn out 120,000 engines a year for the automaker's full-size Tundra trucks, which are assembled in Indiana.
"This Alabama-made engine will be a key to our success in the truck market," said Kosuke Shiramizu, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Corp. He urged employees to "investigate ways to eliminate wasted material, space and time, and to work safer."
Employees at the plant have been undergoing extensive, hands-on training for several months.
Rodney Pope and Greg Moss traveled to Japan, where they trained for about two months at Toyota facilities there.
Moss worked at the Steelcase office furniture factory in Athens before being hired by Toyota.
"I wanted job security, and I liked Toyota's reputation," he said. Steelcase laid off more than 200 workers during the past year, but recently announced it is expanding.
"It's been unbelievable," said Pope, who lives near New Market. The 37-year-old is a team leader in the block machine section, and also spent a month in the automaker's Buffalo, W. Va., engine plant, which makes four-cylinder and V-6 engines.
He said he got a chance to sight-see during his first trip abroad.
"They took really good care of us when we were in Japan," he said. On the weekend, he said, trainees got to see Mount Fuji, Nagoya Castle and other tourist sites.
Pope said adapting to Toyota's culture has been challenging.
"They want you to know their way; they've got a way that's been proven over a lot of years," he said.
"Their way," Lillard said, is kaizen, or continuous improvement.
Kaizen means "never being satisfied with the way things are. It's always a challenge to make it better," she said. "Some people think they've done a good enough job, but then the bar gets raised."
The Huntsville plant began some production April 2 and is running one shift, Lillard said. The first engines were shipped to the Indiana assembly plant April 16.
By fall, the plant will operate two production shifts; from 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and from 4:45 p.m. to 1:30 a.m., producing 450 engines per day. In addition, there will be two shifts for quality control and three shifts for maintenance, she said.
Toyota is still hiring, company officials said, using its original pool of some 30,000 resumes and applications. On Monday, some employees were being trained on site. The machining side of the plant is still under construction; those parts are now being shipped from Japan, Lillard said.
It may still be a few months before trucks with Huntsville engines can be found on local dealers' lots, said Dennis Cuneo, senior vice president of Toyota Motor North America Inc. Dealers will be able to tell by identifying numbers where the engine was made, he said.
