Keys to Toyota's Success

This is old one quality summit in India:-

Understanding the Toyota Way to make India Inc. more competitive Simplification, Continuous improvement and respect for people the key

Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) today organized an unique session for over 140 CEO’s and Business Leaders from over 70 corporates in the Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) factory in Hosur to obtain a first hand experience of the famous Toyota Production System. As a pre-Summit event of the 14th Quality Summit to be hosted by CII from the 16th in Bangalore, where benefits of learning are shared, the TOYOTA WAY gave managers from India Inc. an opportunity to benchmark its own production facilities against the world’s best lean production system.

Each year CII organizes such learning visits to some of India’s best companies. During earlier Quality Summits, visits had been organized to Infosys, Lucas TVS and TVS Motors.

Mr A Toyoshima, Managing Director, TKM besides actively participating in the Q&A session very humbly commented how Toyota was “struggling” with simplification and control systems in Toyota’s continuing quest for excellence.

The relentless journey towards excellence that the Kirloskar group was persuing, learning from the Toyota system, was detailed in length by Mr Vikram S Kirloskar, Executive Director, Kirloskar Brothers Ltd and CMD, Kirloskar Systems Ltd. Defining the Toyota Production System (TPS) as a “thinking system” he related how they had tried to adopt the learnings of continuous improvement, zero debt and higher capital turns by adopting the PDCA cycle (Plan , Do, Check, Act). He further elaborated some critical issues that needed close monitoring like maintenance at every level, plan deployment, target setting with clear processes and defining standard work and the importance of data collection to be able to take a quantitative decision and the feedback and corrective actions.

The important lessons learnt, besides the highly motivating ensuing plant visit was “keep it simple”, “thinking it through before doing it” and building “systems with emotion”. Similar learnings were shared by Mr A R Shankar, GM, Corporate Planning Division, TKM who emphasized that the source of Toyota’s competitive strength emanated from its deep rooted philosophy of continuous improvement and its deep respect for people. Sharing the core managerial values, consolidated management systems across various geographical regions, behavioral values and principles being consistent and handed down more by word of mouth were important points made. Being aware of global challenges, Kaizens, Genchi Genbutsu, respect and teamwork were some of the other points that were underlined.

The various nuances of TPS and its Supply Chain Management was detailed by Mr S L Maine, GM, Plant Administration System, TKM and the policy, development and improvements to its Vendor Development was detailed by Mr T S Jaishankar, GM, Purchase Division,TKM.

The plant visit organized was very much appreciated by the delegates and was a great learning experience. Some of the issues that were covered in the various presentations were actually explained during the plant visit.

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One more Aluminum smelter , this time in Algeria

EMAL/Dubal is going to build .7 mil ton Aluminum plant in Algeria to expand to 1.4 million tons.
Study ongoing according to announcement.
Time frame unknown.

This brings tthe total to 5.7 million tons

one more Aluminum smelter , alumina plant! this time in India

One more announcement!
This time in Andra Pradesh state by a UAE based group.
Aluminium, Alumina & Bauxite mining
Investment $1 billion dollars

one more Aluminum smelter in ME this time in Saudi!

Chalco, BinLadin group and malasian group to set up 1 mil smelter in S.Aarb
to sell to China.

Details awaited -viz
Date of startup, products, raw material supply etc

Total tonnage likely to touch 5 million from 4 in next three years according to my calculations!

outlook for Aluminum and other metals

I was going through a article on the topic recently.
It appears that due to demand from china & india, Aluminum price trend is likely to hold and unlikely to reverse in the next few years i.e. $2,500 ca.

Office of the future? read this!

Read this..
More democratic office?
It will be tough for both the employer as well as employees
People will be requiring tremendous skills!
http://www.rediff.com/money/2007/nov/27spec.htm

one more production increase announcement

As per Dubal announcement smelter capacity is set to increase by 40k by 2008. Also, construction of the world's largest aluminium smelter complex, costing $8 billion, will be started in the first quarter of next year.
Is he referring to Emal is not clear.
Also, not clear is how much of USD 1 trillion investment boom will translate to Aluminum demand?