Toyota weighs up staff relocation

Everyone recalls the news back in January, when Toyota retrenched 350 jobs at its Altona manufacturing plant. In the aftermath of the announcement, Toyota copped a union-led flogging in the local press for the way the retrenchments had been handled.

But the blue-collar blokes at Altona weren't the only Toyota staff the company was scrutinising around that time. Toyota was also looking at relocating the staff housed in its Caringbah (Sydney) office to Melbourne.

"It was a study into whether we should move the sales and marketing operation down to Melbourne as well," explained Toyota Australia's Public Relations Manager, Mike Breen. "They've been conducting those sorts of studies... for about 25 years."

Ultimately the company decided once again that the cost of relocation for the sales and marketing staff at Caringbah could not be justified, although it would have brought key employees together in one facility.

"They just wanted to see if it made more sense to have everyone under the roof from a logistics point of view," Mr Breen continued. "But as the study turned out, [given] the cost of moving people to Melbourne and the number of people who would rather not move to Melbourne — there were a lot of things to consider. And all things considered they decided it was better to leave [the sales and marketing team] where it was."

However, the company did decide to shift its product planners from the Sydney office to Melbourne.

"The sales planning department and the manufacturing planning guys are all based in Melbourne, so they wanted to move all our planning groups into one area," Mr Breen explained.

Toyota's facilities are spread around the country, but principally in Victoria and New South Wales, for historical reasons (see sidebar below). Under different management and at different times there have been various initiatives to centralise facilities or move staff around the country like pieces on a chess board.

Closing the Caringbah office and finding a home for the sales and marketing staff in Port Melbourne would have placed that team within easy driving distance of the local manufacturing facility at Altona, the proving ground at Anglesea, as well as the various Toyota premises dotted around Port Melbourne (including Toyota Style Australia), and Toyota Technical Centre Australia, based in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Concentrating TMCA's executive staff in closer proximity to both the local manufacturing and the global R&D facilities might have resulted in cost savings over time, but not upfront.

The fact that the study has been conducted — in Mr Breen's personal experience — numerous times over the past 25 years suggests the relocation to Port Melbourne and the closure of Caringbah is always a finely balanced argument.

Thiess Toyota introduced the brand here in the late 1950s, when the first LandCruisers were imported to Australia for work on the Snowy River scheme. From that point forward, Thiess and other companies around Australia handled the distribution of Toyota passenger and commercial vehicles, but independently of each other.

"It's a convoluted sort of a story..." says Mike Breen. "York Toyota [was] the New South Wales distributor for Toyota passenger cars. In Victoria, AMI was the distributor for passenger cars, in South Australia CMI Toyota was the distributor for passenger cars, and in Western Australia... Prestige Toyota — as it was called then — was the distributor of passenger cars and commercial vehicles. It was an entirely separate company to Toyota and Thiess — and it still is to this day...

"So back in those days Thiess had responsibility for distribution of passenger and commercial vehicles in Queensland, but commercial vehicles only in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia."

In 1960s Melbourne, Australian Motor Industries (AMI), assembled models of various brands from around the world. Those brands included Rambler (later AMC), Triumph (in its pre-British Leyland days) and Toyota. AMI eventually came to focus solely on Toyota and set up the company's first manufacturing facility here.

"In March or April 1988, TMC [Toyota Motor Corporation] moved in and bought up all the distributors," Mr Breen continued. "Thiess, at that stage, was already 100 per cent owned by TMC. They [TMC] also bought what remaining shares they needed in AMI, and once they did that it all came under the one umbrella company, not including Western Australia."

But the company still comprised two different operations, different in both name and nature. Manufacturing was handled by TMMA in Port Melbourne, and TMSA was based in Sydney.

"Then, in 1989, [TMC] combined the manufacturing, sales and marketing operations to become Toyota Motor Corporation Australia (TMCA), but only on the right-hand side of the country, so to speak," says Mr Breen. That's why the company has been historically 'decentralised'. And Western Australia remains a territory outside TMCA's jurisdiction.

"Basically, Toyota Australia is responsible for everything from the Northern Territory/South Australian borders across, and Toyota WA is responsible for Western Australia," says Mr Breen, who also explained to motoring.com.au that the west is unlikely to come under the control of TMCA in the short term. Stan Perron, the owner and operator of Toyota WA is a "long-standing friend of Sir Leslie Thiess."

"So that's how it came to pass. Sir Leslie owned the right-hand side and Stan owned the left-hand side [of the country]. He's in his eighties now, so until there's some change there, it will probably remain as it is."

Picture shows Toyota Tiara on the AMI production line in Port Melbourne, circa 1963.

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