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48 May 2018 | AutoData SPECIAL AWARDS » TOYOTA By Marcos Rozen CORRESPONDING TO HIGHER REQUIREMENTS Toyota raises the standards for supplier recognition from year to year, which means that the margins should get even narrower in the coming years. T he winners of the sixteenth edition of the Toyota Suppliers Conference can certainly be proud: it is not easy to be recognized by the Brazilian unit of the Japanese manufacturer. Just as in its manufacturing operations, the company firmly applies its principles of continuous improvement to the supply chain, which means that the requirements for recogni- tion are higher year after year. For this last edition, referring to the acti- vities of 2017, for the first time theminimum cutline grade applied in the Quality cate- gory, for example, was 10 ppm or only 10 Disclousure/Toyota defective parts for every 1 million supplied. Therewas also a newminimum reference in terms of cost reduction of at least 4%. “A fewyears agoweworked at 100 ppm, then wewent down to 50 ppm and so on”, says Celso Simomura, vice president of purchasing, engineering, public relations and government. “Today, at 10 ppm, we are already better than the global average, but there are still Asian suppliers working at more difficult levels than this, and that’s what we’re seeking”. By 2018, given the start of production of Yaris and the increase of Corolla and