Senior Manager Purchasing
A challenging career in Purchasing? Look no further. Senior Engineer Oana has been working at Toyota in Brussels for eight years now. She’s has worked on lots of optimization since then and keeps on challenging herself and her team to strive for better. “This mindset is what leads us to excellence”, she says.
It means that, at Toyota, we believe that perfection doesn’t exist. It’s just the best we were able to achieve at a certain moment. We always ask ourselves: how can we make this even better? In my purchasing team, this means improving the way in which we adapt our activities to achieve cost reduction targets, manage the relationships with our partners and maintain our agility in front of the challenging economic environment.
When we were working on the new Yaris, we worked for one year and a half on this part in front of the driver, between the windshield and steering wheel. We worked on optimizing the appearance. I was in a trial process with the supplier, design, process engineering and some other key functions. We kept producing that part all over again, each time improving small things in the process. But then again, we could do better. So, we improved more, and more ... until we were satisfied with it. I loved that project.
When I first started this job, my biggest challenge was to lead a very experienced team. I was thinking: ‘How can I support these people who have much more technical knowledge than I do?’. It took some time for me to understand, but I realised that being a leader doesn’t mean that you know how to do their job. Sometimes it’s enough to ask them a question that makes them think a different way. Or it’s ok to admit that you don’t know and give them advice like whom else they might ask. This was one very important leadership lessons that I learned so far. And I look forward to many more.
Challenging,
experienced,
excellence
