O inaugural message
This is my first message since becoming Chief Operating Officer (COO) on February 1, 2014. I would like to work closely with you all in this position. As you may know, Nakatsuka-san, who joined our company as an advisor, is scheduled to take over as the Chief Executive Officer at the shareholder’s meeting in June. I hope that we can all cooperate together to put our company on track to even greater growth.
Until now, I bore responsibility as Executive Vice President in charge of the Production Division. From this point onward, I will carry out the mission of developing our company with the cooperation of corporate officers from each division and all of the employees. While we have to brace ourselves to achieve our objective of becoming a ¥1 trillion company by FY2018, I believe our path to achieving this objective is to steadily execute each specific measure one by one.
As a B2B company, I want us to work to proactively expand into new regions and gain customers, while continuing to provide attractive products that satisfy car manufacturers. I expect that the key to realizing this will be our competitive strengths of QCT (Quality, Cost and Time). If we can develop a foothold in new notable developing markets while increasing the importance of our major markets, North America, China, Japan and Thailand, I am convinced that this will lead to the future development and growth of our company.
Our company has repeatedly undergone transitions to become the company that we know today, and there are challenges we face that will require us to carry out systematic improvements, such as to our aging production factories, research and testing facilities and global sites, and the fact that ICT (Information and Communications Technology) is not the optimal system for us. In carrying out these improvements, I intend to listen widely to the opinions of the many employees who will be involved. To that end, I hope to tour all of our facilities as soon as possible for an opportunity to hear your voices first-hand.
Changing the subject, the other day I had the opportunity to visit the Dynax Corporation in Tomakomai, Hokkaido. During my visit, the management there said, “Let’s take JATCO as an example. They are rapidly expanding across the world from Fuji City. We also need to become Tomakomai’s global company.” In fact, 5S and “visual control” have been fully adopted throughout the company, and I felt that the employees were strongly motivated. While when I visited Gohsyu Co. Ltd. in Shiga, near Kyoto, I felt that there were many things we could learn from them, such as teaching forging to all employees, as well as practical TPM activities. At a later date a large group of people from JATCO visited them again to carry out benchmarking activities.
There are a countless number of excellent companies expanding overseas that have been established through monozukuri developed carefully in Japan. I hope that we also, as a monozukuri company, will further refine our technology, skills, systems and structures. Furthermore, I understood at a deeper level that benchmarking activities were the source of energy for self-growth.
My final point is regarding the fatal accident that occurred last December. While we have always carried out production activities by putting safety as our top priority, we will change our slogan of “safety first” to “safety absolute.” I ask for your understanding in this regard.
A month has already passed since the beginning of the New Year, and there are only two months left in FY2013. Let’s all work hard to make FY2014 an excellent year.