West Virginia getting some attention in Buffalo; New York That Is!






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Well it appears that name similarity is getting West Virginia and its highly successful Toyota plant some attention in The Empire State. You see, everyone knows Buffalo New York, but not everyone is aware of Buffalo West Virginia. That is beginning to change.

Recently, Toyota published some promotional materials that were featured in the Wall Street Journal. In fact, it was a full page ad, "Fairy Tale of the Plant that Never Stopped Growing," describing the success Toyota has found in West Virginia. The Toyota plant is located in Buffalo, West Virginia, Putnam County.

Recently an analyst for "The Buffalo News" (NY) took at look at the Toyota Plant in Buffalo West Virginia. The results are clear, they are objective, and they are right! - WEST VIRGINIA IS A GREAT PLACE TO DO BUSINESS!


From the Buffalo News (New York)

FOCUS: AUTO INDUSTRY
Auto plant thrives in Buffalo (Buffalo, West Virginia, that is)

While American auto industry founders,Toyota finds formula for success
By JERRY ZREMSKI NEWS NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT
5/7/2006

BUFFALO, W.Va. - Along Route 62 not far from the dusty diamond where the Bisons play ball, you'll find a sprawling modern industrial complex that would be the envy of the bigger Buffalo.
Toyota's ads call it "the plant that never stopped growing."
This glimmering modern engine and transmission plant expanded five times since its groundbreaking a decade ago and has enough land left to double in size. Already it employs 1,100, about equal to the population of the hardscrabble hillside hamlet it calls home.
Meanwhile, 400 miles to the northeast, 2,500 employees at the General Motors Powertrain plant in the Town of Tonawanda and 3,800 at Delphi Corp.'s Lockport facility have their eyes on New York City. There, a bankruptcy court judge this week will consider whether to void Delphi's labor contracts, possibly prompting a strike that could kill thousands of jobs at both companies.
To understand how GM and Delphi, its onetime parts division, ended up in such a fix, it helps to look at what happened in the past decade in this rural river valley 45 minutes northwest of Charleston.

Here, Toyota Motor Corp. invested $1 billion to implement its policies, policies that threaten to dethrone GM as the world's largest automaker.
Experts said those policies - including hiring a well-paid nonunion work force that can work faster and more flexibly than a rules-laden union shop make it unlikely Toyota would ever build a plant in the bigger Buffalo.

The two Buffalos couldn't be any more different.
Here, the Bisons are a high school team, and Route 62 bisects a village made up of trailers and worn wood-frame houses. Folks like to relax in lawn chairs on their front yards and often wave to their neighbors as they drive by. And the town hall is open only three hours a day.
"It's the sort of place where people work hard and then go home to their families or go out and enjoy the hunting and fishing and backpacking that West Virginia has to offer," said David Hobba, a local real estate developer.
This is just the sort of place Toyota loves.

When the Japanese auto giant was looking for a location for an American engine plant in the mid-1990s, its executives found themselves charmed by the hilly West Virginia terrain and the "strong family values-type environment," said David N. Copenhaver, one of the company's first employees in the state.
"West Virginians have traditionally been very hard-working people," said Copenhaver, now vice president of Toyota's West Virginia operation.
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., and governors from both parties spent years courting Toyota. Finally the state offered a $2 million grant and untold tax benefits, and promised to improve access to the interstate, if Toyota agreed to build a plant in a field at Buffalo's southern edge.
Yet experts said the nature of the state and its people mattered more than the incentives.
A company with its roots in rural Japan, Toyota has long been partial to out-of-the-way locales, said James P. Womack, author of "The Machine That Changed the World," a landmark book about the company.

Toyota cherishes loyal employees and figures workers will be more loyal in rural burgs where it's not so easy to find another job down the road.
"They're looking for farmers," Womack said. "They like that country-people reliability. They're comfortable with a lack of sophistication."
Buffalo is the smallest town on Toyota's manufacturing map, but the company also has big factories in such unheralded spots as Georgetown, Ky., and Princeton, Ind.
"You'll notice they're not here in Michigan," said Erich Merkle, director of forecasting for IRN Inc., a Grand Rapids-based automotive consulting firm.

Distance from unions

There's a reason for that. Several experts said Toyota doesn't want to build plants in places like Detroit and Buffalo, N.Y., because workers there might have picked up bad habits in old-line unionized auto plants.
"Why not Buffalo? Industrial workers in Buffalo know too much about the wrong way to do things," Womack said.
While Toyota also has major facilities in or near big cities like San Antonio, none of its plants are in big union towns. Neither are the places where other "transplants" such as Honda and Hyundai build their stateside plants.
At the Toyota plant in Buffalo, the last unionizing effort came in 2003. It fizzled without ever coming to a vote.
"One of the reasons why the transplants have gone down south is because unions are not necessarily well-received in those areas," said Kevin Donovan, Buffalo area director of the United Auto Workers.
The transplants also like states such as West Virginia because they won't be encumbered by big government and high taxes there, industry experts said.
West Virginia ranks 21st nationwide in state and local taxes, the nonpartisan Tax Foundation reports.
New York's are the nation's second-highest.
"A lot of it has to do with business climate," Copenhaver said. "Either you have a business-friendly climate or you don't."
Copenhaver spoke from experience. Before joining Toyota, he had a job trying to lure companies to South Carolina and occasionally traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., to troll for prospects.

"The Toyota Way"

West Virginia's business climate could not have been any friendlier to Toyota. Eight years after it produced its first engine, the Buffalo plant is seen as one of the industry's best.
It's all because the West Virginians who work here learned "The Toyota Way," an unusual management approach that aims to make cars better, faster and cleaner than anybody else.
It is working. Toyota's share of the U.S. auto market has more than doubled in the last 20 years, while GM's has fallen by a third.
In other words, while "legacy" pension and health insurance costs, as well as disappointing new car models, are often cited as the root causes of GM's problems, the Toyota Way stands in GM's way, too.
"Within every segment of the market, Toyota is able to make a lot more money [from its products] than GM or Ford," said Womack, who now runs the Lean Enterprise Institute, which promotes the kind of efficient manufacturing developed at Toyota. "And an awful lot of people are looking for what they make a quality product that works."
Toyotas have ranked at or near the top of most auto quality ratings for two decades, and the secret of that success can be seen on the vast, brightly clean factory floor of its Buffalo plant.
The secret: a melding of man and machine that is designed to produce a perfect product while keeping the man or woman at the machine engaged and healthy.

Mixing it up

The Toyota plant functions very differently than the typical unionized auto plant, where strict work rules tend to narrowly define everyone's job.
As Toyota engines slowly roll down the assembly line, each worker performs as many as a dozen tasks, far more than in many older factories.
Every two hours, workers shift to a different job, so they don't get bored and are less likely to get repetitive-stress injury.
And above all, Toyota employees are infused with the goal of consistently improving the plant and its products.
"There's a greater level of engagement on the part of employees," said Greg Gardner, an analyst with Harbour Consulting, a management consulting firm in suburban Detroit. "And that increased focus prevents defects."
What's more, it allows Toyota to build engines faster. Harbour has named the Buffalo facility the nation's most productive engine plant for three years running.
"Their plants are much newer, so they're very flexible, not only from a work-rule standpoint but in terms of the latest in machinery and equipment," Merkle said.
Of course, not every potential employee will mesh with the Toyota Way. Gerald C. Meyers, a Buffalo native who once chaired American Motors, said the company screens out people who might cause trouble.
"The deal essentially is: You will work very, very hard, you will be paid very, very well, and you will not join a union," Meyers said.

Keeping workers happy

Pay at the West Virginia plant starts at about $19 an hour, about what one would make at a UAW facility, and jobs come with full health care benefits and a 401(K) retirement plan, several sources said.
Toyota employees will never enjoy the kind of early retirement plans and generous pensions that were promised to workers at GM and Delphi. Nevertheless, people in West Virginia said Toyota is just about the best employer around.
"Some people there drive three hours a day to get to work," said Gary Walton, executive director of the economic development agency in Putnam County, which includes Buffalo.
And slowly, those good jobs are changing the face of Putnam County. Buffalo's housing looks a bit ramshackle, but new subdivisions are sprouting to the north and south.
County unemployment, 1.4 percentage points above the national average a decade ago, is now a bit lower than the nationwide rate.
Things could get even better for the region. Copenhaver said he expects the plant's automatic transmission operation Toyota's first in America to continue growing.
That's especially likely to happen in light of Toyota's bright future. For proof of how much investors think of Toyota, note that the total value of its stock is higher than GM's, Ford's and Daimler/Chrysler's - combined.

The fear factor

Analysts said Toyota is afraid of only one thing.
"They're frightened to death that America will turn against them for overtaking the U.S. market and putting American auto workers out of work and some companies out of business," said Meyers, who now teaches at the University of Michigan.
To counter that, you'll find Toyota ads on television and in Newsweek and the New Yorker, touting the wonders of its plant in Buffalo, W.Va.
"What makes the story so exciting is that quite a few of Toyota's plants are growing," the print ad says. "Just like the one in Buffalo. Just like the company called Toyota. It's a true story, a happy story, and best of all, a story with no end in sight."
Walton, the local development director, agreed while acknowledging one regret.
He wishes Putnam County had more flat land, so it might be able to lure the next Toyota assembly plant, which experts expect to be built in some southern state.
e-mail: http://www.buffalonews.com/email/email_form.asp?author_dept_id=43.