Operations

Toyota, Too, Is Looking to Cut Costs

Toyota employees meet in a large "war room" at a plant in Woodstock, Ontario -- called an obeya in Japanese -- to find nearly $100 million in annual savings here and in a nearby plant in Cambridge, Ontario.Among the suggestion: instead of spending $16,000 to hire a contractor to build a conveyor belt for delivering parts to a section of the assembly line, design and build it inhouse for just $700. This effort is part of a companywide drive to redouble efforts to cut costs and bring down inventories of finished cars that by the end of 2008 had ballooned to 100 days’ worth of unsold cars and trucks, more than double the supply the company normally kept on hand.