TOYOTA MOTOR NORTH AMERICA

Toyota Motor North America’ s annual procurement spend

“ The supplier notified through the system eight weeks before there was an actual problem and the beauty is what that eight weeks was able to buy us,” Kevin says.“ It bought us time and we were able to proactively countermeasure it.

“ Without that, we would have been parking vehicles. We would have had to call customers and tell them,‘ Hey, you can’ t get your car when we promised you’.” This proactive approach is the difference between a reactive, painful supply chain and one that maintains flow through transparency.

Driving transformation through shared vision From the very beginning, Toyota’ s founders understood that partnership was central to building something durable. That belief lives on today in the way Toyota engages with its suppliers and dealers, and in how the company has chosen to approach the transformation of its supply chain.

To deliver a transformation of this scale, Toyota knew it couldn’ t go it alone. The company deliberately partnered with others who brought specific domain expertise and outside-in perspective

– and paired that with a sustained investment in building its own internal capability, because the muscles required to run a modern supply chain have to live inside Toyota.

The challenge TMNA set out to solve is not trivial. The company is operating on a foundation of legacy systems and mainframe applications that have served as the transactional backbone of the enterprise for decades. The mandate, therefore, has been a dual one: modernise that foundation while simultaneously reimagining the work itself through AI. Most companies attempt one or the other. Toyota is doing both, on purpose, at the same time – because separating them would have produced a faster answer and a far weaker one.

To push this forward, Toyota has collaborated with a wide ecosystem

16 toyota. com