The most striking sight driving into Toyota Rwanda is not the car showroom. Neither is it the life size dummy standing in the workshop with a safety helmet and face mask on.

It is the ‘Kaizen’ philosophy evident in the business.

Located in Karuruma, the official Toyota car distributor and after-sales service provider is an eight-minute drive from Nyabugogo, on the Kigali-Gatuna road.

On its massive premise, Toyota Rwanda sells cars and Genuine spare parts and offers car-servicing and repairs to individuals and most large corporate institutions in the country.

But Kaizen is not a tool you would expect to see at the country’s largest car-service provider. It is a way of life and work that you notice while at the Toyota Rwanda service station.

The three and a half year-old company maintains Toyota vehicles in line with standards of Toyota Motor Corporation (TMC), the manufacturer.

As I toured its large garage, Aboubakar Muvakure, a technician, insists that Toyota Rwanda knows your car better than anyone else.

"No one can treat it better,” boasts the 38-year-old mechanic whose colleagues call Abouba.

He is the workshop supervisor and has spent 13 years learning all vehicle systems, bumper to bumper including suspension system, engine, clutch and transmission, and wheel alignment.

Abouba started with Toyota Rwanda from the very beginning in 2017.

Inside the workshop, Anzen philosophy is another eye-catcher. Anzen is a Japanese word for ‘safety’.

On a whiteboard called the ‘safety calendar’ at the entrance, the board has 12 months of the year and every month has 31 boxes. Employees mark days of the year in yellow if any incident occurs or green where the day was marked safe.

"Even if it’s a scratch, we mark it here,” says Ali Timimi, Deputy Managing Director at Toyota Rwanda, pointing at two yellow marks on the board.

Next to the calendar are names and contacts of company employees who are trained as first aiders and fire marshals.

Apart from nine bays and eight vehicle lifts, the workshop is also equipped with tools and machines that cannot be found in most other garages, according to Abouba.

First, he directed me towards an electronic state of the art wheel alignment machine, then a portable jump starter, then a brand new Toyota Hilux donated by the manufacturer for training use by the technicians.

In addition, he demonstrated an Air-conditioning machine, a one of its kind in Rwanda that extracts air and recharges, and checks for gas leakages within the A/C system of your car.

It is used to drain dirty oil and evacuate and recycle air-con gas from the vehicle to take care of the environment as per manufacturer’s standards.

Toyota Rwanda boasts state-of-the-art technology as well. Global TechStream, a next generation diagnostic tool developed by TMC, is used to do a "health checkup” of your vehicle.

This technology uses an up-to-date, intelligent software and a communication module to assist technicians to diagnose and reprogram Toyotas using a computer with direct links to the manufacturer’s support team for real time support.

It complements a diagnostic questionnaire filled upon arrival of the vehicle.

Kaizen is everywhere at Toyota Rwanda – control boards and monitors and tiny notices hanging around.

This, Timimi says, is aimed to drive efficiency and better the most important thing to the company - The customer experience.

As Covid-19 prevention, vehicles are disinfected on arrival.

Also a client is given an agreeable delivery time and the vehicle is cleaned at no extra charge before being delivered back to the customer.

Social impact

Toyota Rwanda has 50 full-time employees, according to Caroline Wambui, who is in charge of Human Resources.

Besides being one of the biggest taxpayers in the country, the company has contributed, among others, to the construction of schools. The company enacts its social responsibility to the local community every three months without fail.

As new cars with new technologies are released every year, capacity building is key at Toyota.

Outside the workshop stands a state-of-the-art training centre – a smart classroom – dedicated for the training of all technicians connected globally via an online platform.

Each one is supposed to take at least 160 hours of training every year.

"Most of the training focuses on what they do but we also equip them with soft skills,” says the Human Resources Manager, underscoring the importance of capacity building for the future of the employees and the business.

"By training our employees, we invest in them and the company as well,” she added.

"This aligns back to the Kaizen Philosophy. Kaizen means ‘continuous improvement’ in Japanese and we continuously challenge ourselves to improve our people and our processes.”

According to the Deputy Managing Director, every employee is expected to think at least two ideas every year that can improve efficiency, customer service experience, employee satisfaction, quality and cost savings.

"There never is a dull moment in Toyota Rwanda operations,” Timimi said.