On a Roll

Toyo's 'smart plant' gets smart training from Quick Start

After 30 years in the industry, Jim Hawk knows what the inside of tire manufacturing facilities usually look like — and this isn’t it. In 2005, Toyo Tire and Rubber Company opened its first U.S. manufacturing facility in White, Ga., and inside, gleaming bright blue and yellow machinery does the heavy lifting in a smaller, smarter building than even the company’s home plant in Sendai, Japan.

“Toyo has been very patient and clever, methodically developing their own automated process and expanding here to a new facility when they felt the time was right,” says Hawk, senior vice president and plant manager for Toyo Tire North America. “Starting here with a blank sheet of paper meant we could have the right location and new, automated equipment, which meant a building with a smaller footprint, requiring less inventory, a less labor-intensive process and half to two-thirds the workforce of a similar operation.”

The new facility, with its 500,000 square feet of manufacturing space and 400,000 square feet dedicated to warehousing, is set up to respond instantly to the needs of the U.S. market for Toyo’s specialty high-performance and off-road tires, reducing both the amount of stock the company must keep on-hand and dealer backorders.

“Having this plant in the U.S. means we can carry significantly less inventory — two to three months less,” says Hawk. “This plant was designed for small-lot production, so we can change our schedule every day, or within the day.”

This smarter facility demands smarter employees. The level of automation in this plant means its inhabitants spend more time thinking and working with multiple machines, and less time repeating tasks. To maximize their time in this fast-paced environment, they need smarter training aids, a Quick Start specialty.

"Our people are here to operate machines and think in terms of the entire process — not to do physical work,” says Hawk. “In a manual operation, jobs are limited in scope and repetitive. Our jobs are more all-encompassing.”

So, Quick Start literally threw away the manual, creating searchable, computer-based job aids available to machine operators throughout the plant. Instead of paging through a paper manual to figure out how to troubleshoot a twitchy machine, Toyo employees can type in a search term and a computerized database will quickly show them — in photos, words, animations and even video — how the machine’s process works and where and how to correct a problem.

The softer side

In addition to high-tech, computer-based training, Quick Start is providing new Toyo employees with the background they need on the company, its processes, safety and interpersonal skills before they ever walk onto the plant floor. Forty hours of classroom training are now offered to each new hire, which executives say helps employees ease into their first days on the job.

“Quick Start has developed materials that make employees more comfortable before they hit the floor,” says Curtis Adams, training coordinator for Toyo. “Before, they only had a couple of hours’ overview on human resources and Toyo policies and some pizza first; it was ‘start quick’ versus a ‘Quick Start.’”

Speedy delivery

Having its nearly 400 employees up to speed before getting down to business is just one factor Toyo credits for its extremely successful startup. After breaking ground in October 2004, the facility was in pilot production only a year later. In January 2006, Toyo was selling product from the plant, and this fall will reach full production of about 1.4 million units per year for the facility’s first phase.

“If we’d had to do all of the training and SOP development ourselves that Quick Start’s doing, it would have cost us another six months at least,” says Hawk. “Quick Start was able to blend right in to our organization — even going to Japan to work with the people there. They’re real go-getters, and a big part of our success has been because of Quick Start’s help.”

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