Even when Susan Elkington takes a moment to sit down in her office for an interview, it still feels like life in her world is always pressing forward.
But that comes with the job for the new president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc. (TMMK), Toyota’s largest manufacturing facility in the world. Elkington’s appointment is one of many recent transitions at the 1,300-acre campus of the Georgetown-based facility as it looks to press ahead in an automotive manufacturing industry full of potentially transformative unknowns.
Magnus Lindqvist
Susan Elkington
In addition to Elkington’s leadership, the company added an $80 million North American production engineering headquarters in Georgetown last year and announced a $1.3 billion investment to retool and upgrade the plant, which was launched three decades ago as Toyota’s first wholly owned manufacturing plant in the United States.
Elkington, an engineer by trade with a penchant for stepping up to meet new challenges in her career, has her sights set on tapping the energy and the ingenuity of the plant’s next-generation workforce to be ready for whatever the swiftly transforming auto industry sends their way.
When discussing the company’s future, Elkington is engaging and confident, although she won’t speculate too far ahead about what the future will hold for TMMK or what she sees rolling off the lines in Georgetown. Her plan, instead, is to make sure the facility and its workforce will be ready and capable for anything.
A history of firsts
Stepping out of her comfort zone — and being a female first — has become a recurrent theme for Elkington throughout her career.
In her first engineering job, she worked in design for a contract electronics firm in her home state of Indiana. Most of her days were spent staring at a computer screen, she said, but her real interest had always been in seeing things come together — and taking them apart. She kept finding reasons to wander down to the company’s prototype lab. After a couple of years, Elkington and one of her coworkers on the manufacturing side went to management to ask if they could swap positions, and the boss agreed.
When Toyota announced it was building a new manufacturing plant in Indiana, Elkington was one of the first 200 people to sign on, as an assembly production engineer. She had the opportunity to see the new plant come together, and 18 months later, she was promoted to supervisor of maintenance, even though the field was new terrain for her. The job gave her great hands-on experience with the equipment, she said, and soon she stepped up again to become an assistant production manager, overseeing a team of 100. For Elkington, a self-proclaimed introvert with an appreciation for technical detail, it was a leap of faith but one that paid off. She thrived on the interaction, she said, and the improvements and added efficiencies that could be achieved through collaboration.
“I absolutely loved it,” she said. “I didn’t ever make a request to go back to the technical side again.”
Prior to joining TMMK a year ago, Elkington worked at Toyota’s global headquarters in Japan and was the first female to serve as general manager of the company’s production control division, in support of the company’s more than 50 manufacturing plants worldwide. Elkington is also one of three females appointed to head major Toyota manufacturing plants in the United States in the past year, along with Millie Marshall at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana, Inc., and Leah Curry at Toyota Motor Manufacturing West Virginia, Inc.
“I have worked with Leah and Millie for years. For all three of us to be presidents at the same time, that’s a big achievement."
“I have worked with Leah and Millie for years,” said Elkington, adding that it’s not unusual for the three to have a little good-natured side competition on their daily vehicle production totals in the works. “For all three of us to be presidents at the same time, that’s a big achievement for us.”
Elkington said she also takes her responsibility to lead by example as a role model very seriously, challenging all young girls with a bent for math, science or technology to follow her lead.
“Do something that makes you excited,” Elkington tells them. “And try something different. If I had never gone into production, I would not be doing what I’m doing today, and I love what I’m doing.”
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Working globally, locally
These days, Elkington’s mission is gearing up the Georgetown plant and its workforce to deliver on Toyota’s investments in its New Global Architecture (TNGA) platform. The objective for TNGA is essentially to make better-performing cars in more nimble and efficient production facilities, in the face of a rapidly changing marketplace. New technologies have been incorporated, such as laser screw welding, which uses low-heat lasers to make welds that are stronger, closer together and completed faster than conventional spot welding can manage, resulting in a more rigid structure for a better driving experience. The system uses many shared components for vehicles, making it possible for multiple models to be assembled on the same line. The production areas are also made to be smaller, more environmentally friendly and more efficient overall, resulting in estimated plant cost savings in some instances of up to 40 percent.
Elkington, once again, has been at the front of Toyota’s adoption of TNGA. She was in Japan in 2016 during the production changeover and the launch of the first vehicle ever built under the TNGA system, a Prius. Now she is leading the charge on the other side of the globe at TMMK with the 2018 Camry, the first TNGA-based vehicle to be assembled in North America. Starting this spring, the plant is scheduled to start production of Toyota’s 2019 TNGA-inspired Avalon, which was unveiled in January at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
But Toyota’s $1.3 billion investment in Georgetown, including a new paint shop currently under construction, is about more than gearing up for TNGA, Elkington said.
“We’ve been here for 30 years,” Elkington said of the TMMK plant. “The investment we made is really about making us capable of producing for the next 30 years. … It will allow us to continue to look at what our options are for the future.”
The heart of an engineer
Elkington’s stint in Japan gave her the opportunity to travel the world and experience Toyota’s facilities around the globe, but when it was time to return to the United States, her passion was still firmly entrenched on the production line. She requested an assignment at a production facility, with the flagship Kentucky location as her first choice, she said. Elkington’s favorite days on the job are still the ones that she gets to spend on the production floor, digging into the process and bouncing around ideas with others to engineer a better way.
“I am not one who likes to stand up in front of a large group, but I love to talk to people one-on-one, to be able to work in small groups,” she said.
Having a vision for the company is important, Elkington said, but leading for her means relating — transferring that vision of what can be achieved in meaningful and motivating ways to others, so they can move it forward. And that connection to the final finished product is made more through the heart than through the hands.
“I know that the quality of our product will be based on the feeling that the person who’s building it has about that product and about the company."
“I know that the quality of our product will be based on the feeling that the person who’s building it has about that product and about the company,” Elkington said.
That’s why Elkington focuses a lot of her attention on building pride — in the workplace, the workforce and the products — in the face of an increasingly fluid industry. It’s also important, Elkington said, for team members to understand the current business conditions in which they operate.
“We are in a market that is changing,” Elkington said. “This facility had been at full capacity for a long time, producing Camrys, Avalons and, in the past years, the ES [Lexus ES 350] — and we are not at full capacity.”
Getting back up to full steam will require a team that’s empowered and ready to take those leaps.
“We have to be flexible,” Elkington said. “We’re not going to be able to produce the same Camry over and over again.”
Next-generation workforce
But employee engagement has always been a key ingredient in the Toyota Production System, or TPS, and Elkington said her team is up to the task.
“When I talk about TPS, many people think that’s about how we improve our efficiency, but it’s not just about efficiency,” Elkington said. “You have to make sure that you are following the Toyota way and the Toyota values, which value the input of everyone in the process. You can’t make those improvements unless everyone is engaged.”
Bringing everyone on board becomes particularly challenging in light of the natural turnover experienced by the TMMK plant in recent years, as the first generation of employees at the 30-year-old plant has transitioned over the past decade into retirement.
“Forty percent of our workforce has been hired in the past five years,” Elkington said. “We have this large group of new team members who need to learn deeply about what it means to work for Toyota and what those values are, and how to care for the product in the way that we work together to make things better.”
But Elkington also sees a positive side to the transition.
“It’s a great opportunity for many of our members who have been here many years to be teachers, not just about building cars but also about how you go about making your process better,” Elkington said.
And in the meantime, Elkington has a little personal experience of her own to draw on in passing on the Toyota traditions. In January, her daughter, a graduate of the University of Louisville’s school of engineering, joined the quality engineering team at Toyota’s Indiana plant.
The future of car manufacturing
When it comes to the future of the industry, Elkington is not interested in getting ahead of herself, but Toyota’s early concepts and ideas about the possible future of mobility have been pretty amazing.
That vision has included a host of wild new ideas lately, including Concept-i mobility vehicles with artificial intelligence to gauge a rider’s mood, learn their preferences and engage them in conversation to suggest a new hobby, or maybe a good restaurant nearby. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, in partnership with Pizza Hut, the company unveiled a new customizable e-Palette concept that may someday cook your pizza on the way to delivering it, sans driver, to your door.
The possibilities are intriguing, and if the general industry trend of a decreasing sedan market continues, Elkington agreed the facility will potentially be looking to expand its product line someday. But she is not looking to pinpoint what the next big thing will be. Whatever new advances the future brings, her mission is to have TMMK ready to bring its production to Kentucky, when the time is right.
“Five years from now? I expect we are going to be building cars,” Elkington said. “Right now our big focus is just trying to improve our plant and make the best cars that we can, so that as decisions are made, we are always considered.
“We don’t know what we might be producing 30 years from now, but we want to make sure we are capable of being able to do it right here at this site,” Elkington continued. “We’re trying to make those improvements one step at a time, in order for us to get there.”