Business Excellence Member News: Futaba-Tenneco wins Major Award from Toyota
Futaba-Tenneco has won the Toyota Supplier Award for Achievement in Project Management for 2012, for introducing the tools, fixtures and assembly robots for the new Toyota Auris and the Hybrid version, as well as training most of the workforce in the new products.
Burnley-based Futaba-Tenneco beat off the challenge from over 200 suppliers throughout Europe to be presented with the award at Toyota’s Annual Business Meeting in Brussels.
From its North-West factory, Futaba-Tenneco supplies many and varied pressed and welded components such as roof pillars, centre pillars, roof rails etc direct to the production line at Toyota in Derbyshire.
The company didn’t supply a single defective part out of millions supplied, all parts were labelled correctly, no deliveries were late, the whole process was completed on a self sufficiency basis – which basically means very little assistance was required from Toyota along the way – which is almost unheard of.
Futaba-Tenneco carried out major re-training as part of reducing the cells from two to one person in an effort make the manufacturing process as lean as possible. The company also refurbished old robots, resulting in cost savings of over £1 million.
This is not an award that is entered for, it is given by Toyota simply on merit, which is a huge achievement for Futaba-Tenneco’s factory.
Futaba-Tenneco also won an award from Toyota for Product Delivery.
