“Perfection is just a snapshot.”

A challenging career in Purchasing? Look no further. Senior Manager Oana has been working at Toyota in Brussels for eight years now. She’s has worked on lots of optimalisations since then and keeps on challenging herself and her team to strive for better. “This mindset is what leads us to excellence”, she says.

What do you mean by ‘perfection is just a snapshot’?

“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 achieve our targets in terms of cost reduction, manage the KPI’s and also report to management for all those KPI’s.”

Can you give a specific example of a project on which you worked this way?

"When we were working on the new Yaris, we worked for one year and a half on this part in front of the driver, where the steering wheel is attached to. We worked on optimizing the look of it. I was in a trial process with the supplier, design and some other people. 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 it was perfect. I loved that project.”

As a manager, what is good leadership to you?

“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 a big eye-opener for me.”

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