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In business circles Toyota is talked of with awe. Not for its cars or well-heeled Formula One team, but because it is a manufacturer that has a policy that has lifted it from Japanese almost ran, to serious rival to Ford in Henry Ford's home, the USA.
The list of organisations that have tried to ape the Toyota 'lean production' method includes rivals GM and Ford, aerospace giants Boeing and even the NHS. Jora Gill is one of many business people to admire Toyota, but he can also claim to have achieved a similar success story.
Lean manufacturing allows Toyota, or any organisation using it, to develop products quickly, reduce the time it takes to produce an end result and have zero to low levels of waste. Toyota can develop a new model of car in just 18 months and in 2006 it took just 29 hours to built a Toyota from scratch.
General Motors took 33 hours at best. A decade ago GM and Ford were taking 50 per cent longer to build their vehicles than Toyota and the final product was famous for its unreliability, while Toyota are famous for the opposite.
Since joining Standard & Poor's (S&P) as VP for international business systems in 2006, Gill has taken his inspiration from the company and introduced Agile development and project management system that is gaining popularity.
Gill uses Toyota as an example of why Agile is well worth adopting. "It's better value. Toyota's business has taken off because it's delivering faster, and better quality.
"Describing how it overtook the stalwarts he adds, "It's not taken off because they're cost cutting, which is where Ford are, or GM." Like the car manufacturer, he believes it is all about re-appraising how the organisation views its return on investment, and in doing so it will realise that it is seeing a return more rapidly, which means revenue is coming in more quickly.
Although a mass manufacturer, what Gill respects about Toyota is that it has ditched the traditional way of mass manufacturing and instead "produces our cars as our customer wants, and they can have what they want when they need it".
2008 CIO Summit
19th August, 2008 Four Seasons Hotel, Sydney Developed in partnership with CIO Magazine, IDC, INTEP and the CIO Executive Council.
The world of the CIO is extremely complex and diverse. Multiple priorities demand attention and decisions are needed instantly. Individual teams need to be driven towards common goals, and businesses strive to become more mobile, agile and responsive. For CIOs, the challenge never ends.
Every year the CIO Summit identifies what is top of mind for CIOs across Australia and New Zealand, and offers insight for CIO benchmarking and vendor strategic planning alike.
Recent IDC research shows that over 59% of CIO's believe that 'to achieve their business strategies, technology should be used more aggressively than today.'
Join us on August 19th to discover how this is possible with the latest technologies including Virtualisation, Web 2.0, IP Surveillance and Software as a Service (Saas).
Click here for more information.
Please email Denyse_Robertson@idg.com.au for further information.
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CIO Live Podcast #79: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires Part II 05 October, 2007 06:00:00
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #78: Brent D Taylor, author of The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires 28 September, 2007 17:34:25
For his new book, The Outsider's Edge: The Making of Self-Made Billionaires, social researcher Brent D Taylor spent four years of intensive research investigating the psychological make-up and backgrounds of some of the world's richest men and women, including IT luminaries Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs. Taylor discovered that, despite working in different industries and coming from different upbringings, they all have one thing in common -- they are all outsiders. - +
CIO Live Podcast #77: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part III 21 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part three in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #76: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part II 14 September, 2007 07:00:00
Part two in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance. - +
CIO Live Podcast #75: Panasonic Speeds Up Trans-Pacific File Transfers, Part I 07 September, 2007 07:00:05
Part one in our three-part special report from CIO's sister publication Network World in the US, as Paul Desmond reports from the Network World IT Roadmap Conference in Santa Clara, California. With development teams in the US and Japan, Panasonic needed a more efficient way to move very large files between the two locations. Iben Rodriguez, IT consultant for Panasonic Research and Development, explains how a storage-area network and virtual server technology helped speed up WAN performance.
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'I have a lost laptop horror story for you' 30 June, 2008 10:08:14
The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow...The devil of identity theft is in the details that follow: Russ Jones tells a tale of woe that isn't particularly dramatic -- or rare -- and yet it's exactly the kind of story that worries me enough to ignore my better judgment and buy identity-theft protection from my insurance provider. - +
SQL attacks lobs onto pro tennis site 02 July, 2008 11:52:19
Wimbledon perfect time for crook's criminal racket.Visitors to the Association of Tennis Professionals Web site have potentially been infected with spyware after apparent lax security allowed a malicious script to be injected across its pages. - +
Hacking tools: A new version of BackTrack helps ethical hackers 30 June, 2008 10:57:21
BackTrack is the quickest way to get access to hundreds of (legal) hacking toolsVersion 3.0 of BackTrack has been released. BackTrack is a Linux-based distribution dedicated to penetration testing or hacking (depending on how you look at it). It contains more than 300 of the world's most popular open source or freely distributable hacking tools. - +
Japanese military loses data again 02 July, 2008 08:17:21
Japan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data on joint US-Japan military exerciseJapan's Self Defense Force lost sensitive data pertaining to a joint US-Japan military exercise last year, the Ministry of Defense said Tuesday. - +
ACLU, EFF sue US gov't over mobile phone tracking 03 July, 2008 08:37:23
Two civil liberties groups sue the US Department of Justice over mobile phone trackingThe American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) are asking a federal court to order the US Department of Justice to turn over records about the agency's tracking of mobile phone users.
Ballarat Grammar Improves Student Access to Computer Based Learning with HP ProCurve 04 July, 2008 16:49:00
Media release: 40 Per Cent of Australian Businesses Do Not Validate Their Data 04 July, 2008 10:29:00
Kaseya helps turbo charge BlueFire’s service delivery model 03 July, 2008 17:23:00
Computershare Selects Symantec for Data Loss Prevention Globally 03 July, 2008 14:52:00
DST International moves to new Shanghai office 03 July, 2008 13:21:00
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