Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky (TMMK) President Wil James sees the long-term benefits of Toyota’s North American restructuring as worth the stress of the upcoming relocation of 1,550 Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, Inc. (TEMA) employees in Erlanger.
“The advantage for productivity improvement for North American Toyota is going to be substantial with bringing sales and the production control group and the manufacturing headquarters together,” James said of the April announcement that TEMA and California-based Toyota Motor Sales would merge into one entity in 2017 in Plano, a suburb of Dallas, Texas.
“The net effect for Toyota North America is going to be tremendous. I don’t think there’s going to be a major problem for us in Georgetown,” he said.
In fact, James will see an influx of around 300 employees to the Georgetown campus by the time of the move as mostly production engineers from Erlanger will be working in a building currently in the planning stages at TMMK.
“We’ve always had a pretty significant complement of production engineers on site here because we were the closest manufacturing plant to the North American headquarters,” he said. “This consolidation down in Plano just provides the opportunity and it was basically decided that those production engineering folks needed to be at a plant as opposed to the North American headquarters, so it was determined that this was the best place because we’ve got vehicle and we’ve got powertrain needs here. For us, it just means basically more people coming on site, and what we’re going to do is build a new state-of-the-art production engineering center.”
The 60-mile trip between TMMK and TEMA proved convenient for executives, James said, but the planned relocation to north Texas shouldn’t hinder TMMK as it puts the plant on equal footing with the other production facilities in North America.
“We’re going to be just like the rest of the plants in that scheme of things, and I don’t foresee that being a major disadvantage at all,” he said.
“Of course it was real easy to pop on up to the headquarters and have some face to face with folks just up the street in Erlanger. It’s going to be a little less convenient to go down to Plano. However, I think the advantages of having the sales groups and the manufacturing group come together down in Plano far trumps any additional effort that we’re going to have to put into talking to the headquarters,” he said.
“A lot of the stuff that the plant and the headquarters talk about can be done remotely anyway. Some of it is good face to face,” he said, “but it can be done remotely.”