Meetings from morning to afternoon. Finished at about 4.30pm. We then went back to the hotel, starting to prepare our departure tomorrow. Then we went to a Mall nearby for Dinner. The plane starts at about 8.45 tomorrow, so we need to leave the hotel at about 6.00. Therefore I will end my California Business trip blog series now and go to bed 🙂
Again, only a very long meeting and presentation day. Nothing special to report.
Today we visited NUMMI, the New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. This is a joint venture of Toyota and General Motors which was founded over twenty years ago to implement Toyota’s lean manufacturing process in a country outside of Japan. They produce the Toyota Corolla, Tacoma (a compact pickup) and Vibe. It was impressive to see the bodies being put together with the help of robots, and it was interesting to follow the Tacoma production line to see the car being completed piece by piece. Assembling of the vehicle only takes about 3.5 hours, and the complete process which starts with stamping the bodies from large coils of steel takes less then 24 hours (includes several hours of curing in an oven). Then, after some meetings, we had the evening event which some of our colleagues who stayed back in Germany were obviously looking forward to: We had the chance to tabour the drum together with Drum Cafe. All in all it was quite nice, and we already have concrete ideas of how to integrate similar events in our daily work (one was to replace our email systems by drums, but this turned out to be too challenging). So, lets see what else we can do 😉
Another easy day: Meetings. Came back a little earlier than the days before, so I had the chance to write the blog entries for Sunday and Monday.