One Toyota, One Vault

JOE KAWKA: Hello, my name is Joe Kawka. I'm a digital engineer at Toyota Motor North America Production Engineering, and specifically powertrain. And today, my session is One Toyota, One Vault, How to Collaborate as One. This is the safe harbor statement.

And I just kind of want to dive in. In what has happened in our past, data was our muda or waste. Muda is Japanese for waste. And so many times, because we're using shared drives, uncontrolled drives, and whatnot, the time to find data and very specific data that we're needing for our studies often took us hours, if not days.

And then on the rare occasion, weeks, even months to find the correct data or the most up to date data. And so this was a big waste of our time and we needed a solution for that.

Also, with this separation or uncontrolled set of data out there, we're very siloed and there is no collaboration between groups because of that. Essentially, all of our groups would have their own shared drive. And it was very restricted from group to group who can actually look inside there and find data that is needed.

For instance, if I needed a overall plant layout of the building, I would have to contact my building designers and ask them for the specific data that I need. And at that point, it might take them a day, it might take them an hour, it might take them a week. It really depends on the organization of the individual.

Also, we did start a vault back in 2020, but the initial thinking way was because of that, is to separate the data, the confidential data from one another. So we had to create five independent vaults or continue to use the uncontrolled shared drives, because that was the easier route for many people. Again, this environment was no good for us. It's muda.

And just to really emphasize the separation of all of our groups, you can see in the diagram on the right here, these are different vaults. And then every NAMC, or its North America Manufacturing Company, and were, there's many, many different groups. And every group was independent of one another and there was no way of seeing into each other's data that we potentially needed.

So if we were to continue with this group structure, of our 2020 vault structure back in the day, we had the potential of exponentially growing to 138 groups. That's an absurd amount to think of to manage. And that's just a very conservative number. The number of groups could be a lot larger than that.

Also, another division of roles. With each group, there's yet another division of roles spanning executive managers, engineering managers, team member, working level, and any level in between, and that just created another subset that separated people, that separated groups, and really made things hide and whatnot. So, it was a bad situation and not very well managed if at all

So we want to work as one. Like, how do we get to one vault? And it seemed to have been a impossible hurdle to get over, but I feel I have a solution for us. First, I do want to review some of the vault functions just as more of a reminder. And these descriptions are directly out of the help page from vault.

So we have roles and we have our groups. And roles, I think of more of as permission settings for a given role. So if you're a modeler, you can go into models and you can start editing them and you can do what have you, but maybe you can't get into classified documents.

If you're an executive manager, maybe you can edit your classified documents, but you can only reference and view the models, because you don't want to mess anything up. You don't want to accidentally make a new, a mistake on opening up a uncontrolled document and messing everybody's study up.

Groups are exactly that. Groups of people that surround a common theme. And previously what we had done, is assign roles to groups, and that was the way that we really limited the permissions or managed the permissions. I personally believe that is not the best way as far as large organizations go.

So what I have proposed for groups and project structures is the following. And currently, I'm implementing this in my powertrain division, but I do plan on bringing this out and sharing with the rest of the departments. And hopefully, this is agreed upon and everybody is able to work cohesively in this space.

And to explain it, I have these two bullet points. And the big major change is taking off the roles from the groups and moving it onto the user itself. So that's why I am calling out here, user defined roles.

This enables me to really define by person and set the permissions by person. So we can combine our managers. We can combine our working level team members into the same group, and yet they still have their appropriate permissions to view the vault as needed.

And then projects, they're also easily shared and accessed for maximum collaboration between departments. So I am setting up our folder structure by the NAMC or the North America Machine, Company or Manufacturing Company.

And with that folder structure, we're able to even have our projects overlap one another, enabling different departments, different groups able to work on the same project, and yet keep their permissions appropriately.

And then lastly, with this combination into one vault, another big advantage is to have a common asset library. This creates opportunity for commonization of what have you.

Where we're installing hundreds of machines, so if we can commonize what machine that is that we're installing, then that is a large cost savings or even down to the fittings. So it's something that would be available for all groups and all projects to reference.

And to go in a little bit deeper for the folder structure that I kind of mentioned, I would open or I'm opening up my folder structure to all departments and all the NAMCs currently. And the three main areas is the project center itself, which I'll go into more detail in the next slide. But that's where we're housing every project that we've had, all the study data, all the overall layouts. Most of the CAD software or data that we need to manipulate and whatnot.

The second pillar, if you would, is resources. And this is to share the knowledge across all departments and across every group, every division, every NAMC. So this is a common space for people to drop in how-to's, their control documents, their templates even for their CAD, and where other people can reference and learn from and really commonize the workload across everyone.

And lastly, the asset library, which takes up most of the space down here in the graphic. And this is again, shared with everybody. And in an effort to commonize as much machinery, as much of the utilities or PLCs as possible for a cost savings, and these assets would be referenced inside of the projects as needed and forever be controlled, and yeah, and kept safe under the asset library.

So probably the biggest question that I get is, how do we work with our files, especially with the layouts within the NAMC or within a project? And so this is what I've come up with as far as that proposal goes. And the project center again, would be categorized by NAMC, so that's each folder.

As you can see here, every NAMC has a folder. And then with each NAMC, they have a master layout or in my case, I'm calling it a top folder. And that houses the current condition of the layout with the respective projects on the same level, if you would. So current condition, it's really up to if there's a change, a change to the layout or the floor itself, we would need to make the updates directly to the top folder.

And then within the project folder, what we would do, is we split it up into the working layout and then project data. Project data, that is really up to every department's, every group's discretion on how to organize. But there will need to be some sort of map associated with it.

But as far as a working layout, we would use the vault's function to copy out the top folder and to set working layouts. And then in here, we would be able to make our edits without affecting the current condition master layout. We can make multiple instances. We can make different xrefs into the main layout and really dive into our study and see the history of our study itself.

Once the working layout is done and we're going through our project, we've handed over to whoever we need to hand over to all, the project data, we start installing the machines per this working layout once that installation is done.

Then we would update our master layout with that finalized approved working layout, if you like to approve it. So that's how we can keep track and revision control the master layout of each NAMC, and also be able to really study and work and manipulate as needed in every project.

As far as the project security goes, there's many options that-- I'll preface that. Every folder, you can lock it down to only specific people who can see it. So if you have executives that you only want executives to see the folder itself, you can lock it down as you would.

But in a more general sense, the way I would like to, or I would set up the projects, is this following structure where TEMA, TEMA is essentially a central role. That's where I'm located. And it's overseeing each North America Manufacturing Company or facility.

So I can see into the Kentucky plant. I can see into West Virginia. I can see into Texas, et cetera and whatnot. And that's only with assigning me to this department compartmental-wise.

But if there's a person, a CAD person, or any other person that needs to get in the vault at the satellite location itself, we would assign both the department and the inside satellite location. And that way, they have the appropriate set-up, if you would, for the following security.

So with every project folder, so I'm going to go back one. With every project folder, as you can see linked directly below the NAMC, the department, so in my case, powertrain, it could be paint, it could be body weld, it could be another one. But every department is able to view, modify, delete, and download into said project. And that's again, the TEMA, team member is able to go in there and make those edits.

With the next level down, other departments. So I'm in powertrain. What I would do for paint, what I would do for body weld, what I would do for assembly, is I would allow them to view the project. I would allow them to download it, if they happen to need something and work on it locally.

But they are not able to modify, they're not able to delete. So even if they did download something, start messing with it, they would not be able to re-upload it and overwrite any of our work as far as the powertrain-specific department goes. So that is this third column here.

And then with the project folder, again, the NAMC, the same NAMC, I would allow them to view, modify, delete, download. So that's within their respective department. So powertrain West Virginia, they're able to look at their projects and work within their projects and do everything they need.

And then lastly, is every other NAMC would be able to, again view and download, but not be able to modify or delete. So, same West Virginia team member is able to see their own projects, but they want to reference a project that is in Kentucky because it's essentially a copy--

--and so they can look in there, they can view it, and they can have and get very valuable information, but they cannot overwrite anything within the Kentucky project. They have to bring it into their own. So again, other department, an NAMC member, they're only able to view and download.

And so this creates visibility for all, as you can see, or even accessibility, if you would. But it really restricts the modifying and deleting part, which is the very concern of, or the very reason of why we split up all of our vaults in the first place, along with the security and whatnot.

So just within the powertrain group, I was able to reduce the number of groups that we had. And in our case, the number of groups was equivalent to, there was a cost associated with it. So any reduction in group usage is a monetary savings.

But also, I personally feel that it is a headache saving, where there's less groups that you really have to manage. And it's down to the individual. Was the individual promoted to a manager? You can change their role, because their role has changed. So it's very intuitive that way.

But I was able to reduce the six groups within powertrain itself. And there's opportunity for a lot more reduction there. Also, like I said, reducing the headache or the head count, if you would. Currently, the amount of subject matter experts is reduced to five people. And that's all part-time.

I think I'll disclose that we haven't really had that many admins there, but also, with this new implementation, we don't have to plan for a head count up. We can just keep it the same or even lower it, depending on the situation, which is always a good part.

And it's a system of management that doesn't need to be monitored all the time, or it doesn't need to be somebody's sole role or responsibility. This is something that you can come back to every once in a while and make your updates every Monday and that's all. You don't have to have a dedicated person managing all of these groups, because it is self-sufficient.

And then also kind of linking it back to our controlled, or linking it back to the time to find and share documents. So with the shared data, with this controlled data, just bringing the level of control, that authoritative source of truth, reduces many, many hours of searching or even validating that this is the latest and greatest file.

Oftentimes also, we find a version, an old version of a file and we don't realize that it's an old version until we're a month down the road and we need to make, or we get an update from somebody else. And so this really reduces an unfathomable-- reduces a lot of time that could get lost.

And then transformation, it's really, we're getting that trust back into our files. We, like I said, we have little to no trust in our shared drives, because they're so uncontrolled. But this, with the vault, gives us that authoritative source of truth that everybody can really rely on. They can reference and not have to second guess or drag and drop random folders into different folders unknowingly.

Other than that, that is my session. That's the end of my talk. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. And I hope you have a great day. Thank you.