Within Toyota itself, non-production personnel support the TPS approach. “We very much value the Toyota way,” says David Betteley, managing director of Toyota Financial Services (UK) and vice president operations for Europe and Africa. “The key values of the Toyota way are teamwork, respect, challenge, kaizen and genchi genbutsu.

“You produce a new product and it can be replicated by a competitor almost immediately, so you have to be always innovating. We are very dealer focused. We have to provide not only a competitive service pricewise to dealers, but also be competitive in terms of the length of time it takes to deal with things. We have to be moving and changing all the time and never sit still.”

Applying the TPS to non-production areas of the business isn’t easy, of course. “It’s a challenge converting these best practices in Toyota that have been developed for production and moving them down into sales and marketing, which is what we do,” says Betteley.