Driving the Future of Manufacturing with Frank Voss

From electrification to Industry 4.0, Ontario’s manufacturing sector is undergoing a seismic shift. Frank Voss, President and CEO of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, shares how innovation in technology, workforce development, and global partnerships is reshaping the industry.  This conversation was recorded during the Board's Manufacturing Symposium in October. 

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From the Toronto Region Board of Trade, this is Toronto Talks. Toronto, let's talk about the future of manufacturing. The Toronto Region is in many ways uniquely positioned as a manufacturing centre. But the question is, can we now become a global centre of manufacturing excellence? You know, it's often easy for governments to talk a big game about supporting manufacturers. Quite another to walk the talk. Last year, Ontario created more manufacturing jobs than all 50 U.S. states combined. In an era defined by smart factories, automation, and enhanced productivity, the Toronto region has a golden opportunity to lead the global shift to manufacturing 4.0. But staying competitive means more than just adopting the latest tech. It's about building the right skills, fostering innovation, and creating conditions for business to thrive. The Business Council of Toronto's Advanced Manufacturing Council is laser-focused on this mission, working to drive collaboration and strengthen our manufacturing ecosystem. Frank Voss is the president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada. He's also chair of our Advanced Manufacturing Council. Last fall, Frank was a keynote speaker of our manufacturing symposium, focused on keeping Ontario's global edge. During the event, he sat down with our Senior Vice President of Communications and Marketing, Jennifer Vandervoak. Here's their conversation. Let's start with an introduction. Frank, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to be in the role that you sit in today? Sure. My background is mechanical engineering, and I've had a lot of exposure in the automotive industry for several companies. But I've been with Toyota for 22 years and had a chance to work here in Canada as well as a site down in the U.S. And I've had various roles, production, administration, and then now here as president. Amazing. 22 years. That's incredible. So we're talking a lot about the concept of innovation, which is a word that actually means so many things to so many people and to different sectors, but specifically manufacturing 4.0. Can you tell me a little bit around what that means to you and your organization and how innovation has fundamentally or is fundamentally altering the landscape of the industry? Industry 4.0, maybe take a little bit step back for Toyota, because Toyota is a problem-solving company, right? Based on Toyota Way and TPS. And we believe that we should engage everyone. It isn't just the engineers and scientists in the back room. Everybody has great ideas and they can innovate and improve their own daily processes and lives. And what's happening now though is technology is making information much more accessible. So with Industry 4.0, we're gathering a lot of information in real time from the shop floor and we're making it available to people. And the people who need to use that information on a daily basis also have access to tools like a low-code and no-code development to take that information and make it relevant for them. So they can make real-time decisions and act on things much quicker. And I think that's really what Industry 4.0 is all about. Trying to take the world, digitize it, get information to the right people quickly so they can make decisions. And some of that, depending on who you are, you know, our maintenance folks, obviously they're doing things like predictive maintenance, getting information about the running condition and trying to use that information to determine is it healthy or not healthy, or is there going to be a future problem? So that I can try and address that without having production take downtime, right? Try and solve those problems early, be proactive. Or if I do have a problem, then I can use these tools to help me diagnose what the problem is quicker so I can reduce the mean time to recovery. It's interesting. It's almost a way of you're taking the innovation in to advance the personalization of what workers are doing with that data, what they're doing with that information. So it's really giving them new avenues to deliver they're trying to do to the best way possible. That's right. I think you're, you are giving the information to the person who knows, right? And the person who can take action and can quickly respond to real-time situations in production. Yeah, that's excellent. That's great. And obviously innovation doesn't come without obstacles. Are there any significant challenges that your industry faces, that Toyota faces when it comes to adopting new technology? I think the challenge is making sure that we have people that are educated and capable, right? The technology really relies on having talent that can take advantage. So for us, really, it's been about teaching people how to use those tools, making them accessible. So it's reskilling, multiskilling, and when we get the information and when we get the tools into our team members' hands, they do some pretty amazing things. It's all about the people, really. Well, let's talk a little bit about partnership then, talking about people, but in today's world, really no industry operates in isolation. And certainly that is very true of the auto sector. Can you tell me a little bit about any partnerships or collaborations, whether with tech companies, research institutes, government, academia, that is really helping to advance and move the needle on the sector? You're right. Partnerships are very, very important for us. And especially when you talk about technology, there's a balance between doing it yourself and taking what's off the shelf and working with partners to try and integrate that into a solution that works. We're very, very fortunate in Ontario, all the way from Windsor to Ottawa, we've got a fantastic technology corridor right here, right? A lot of high-tech companies, I think we're the second largest investment area for IT and for startups. And where we are in Kitchener-Waterloo area, we've got some great universities and colleges, right? We've got a great relationship with the University of Waterloo and the ecosystem that's around the university. We work with Communitech and Communitech takes the academia as well as, you know, technology companies that are in the area. And we have things like collision days. We'll go there and we'll bring a set of problems, right? And then they will go and identify companies that may have a solution that would benefit us. They'll bring them in. They'll show us kind of a concept of what they would propose. And we've had several really good innovations that have come from working like that. That's really exciting. So you're bringing the innovators and, in essence, really the supply chain into the innovation that you're applying and the problems you're trying to solve. That's right. Yeah, that's great. So let's shift a little bit and talk a bit about policy. So policy inevitably shapes the direction of innovation for any sector. And if you look at Canada's evolving regulatory landscape and you think about competitiveness, what impact do you think current or future policies could have on manufacturing and advancing where you're trying to go? One of the challenges I think that we have, we talked a lot this morning with Minister Frideli, he talked about red tape production and trying to improve things. One of the challenges I think that we face is trying to be maybe a little too local when it comes to regulations and standards. To it as a global company, we buy technology from all over the world. And sometimes bringing that here to get it implemented, we find that things like, you know, pre-start health and safety checks, PSHSR, they are pretty expensive. They take a long time. And sometimes you're rewiring equipment to the local standard. It's already been built and being used globally to a standard that works just fine. So, you know, that mismatch between what we think is required locally and international standards. We need to focus more on what is suitable and it doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be good enough. So we want to speed innovation. We don't want to block it with all of these unnecessary checks. We want to make sure that we're confident it's going to be safe and it's going to work well. But at the same time, we don't want to overdo it. Yeah, Giles says that a lot. It's only red tape when it's unnecessary. Like there's need for regulation, but if we can advance global best standards and global best practice, then that's the way forward faster, right? Yeah. And I think the, uh, the, the innovation that we have here, um, the opportunities are terrific for us to be able to export what we're developing. And, uh, you know, where we are in, in a team MC there in, in Cambridge, um, we've got a great innovation group. It's a, it's a kind of a center of excellence here in North America when it comes to, um, IT and, and technology. And we have, uh, we've done a lot of, uh, development that has been propagated to the other manufacturing sites for Toyota here. And we have several that have gone to Japan, right? So it's terrific that, you know, we can build to global standards for whether it's, you know, cybersecurity or cloud-based or different technologies, we're able to build them, package them and then make them available across our company. So. Excellent. It's really, it's, it's really exciting. And I mean, the future of manufacturing is really exciting and it's not just about technology, but it is about people. Uh, so what is Toyota doing? What are you doing to really invest and ensure that your current workforce is prepared for what that future looks like? I think we're, uh, the, the first thing is we engage them, right? We make sure that they are able to work on their own problems. And, uh, then we're, we're working on exposing them to different tools and technologies. And we're quite willing to invest in training, um, and, uh, getting them to, uh, take courses, whether it's at the colleges or whether we bring people in to, to support them. Um, but a lot of it is on the job. You know, if someone's got a problem that they're trying to solve, they tend to be more engaged, right? They tend to want to learn and they can apply what they learn pretty quickly. So that cycle, I think, works much better than taking some course and then in the future, maybe I'll use it. No, if I can use it today, it really accelerates the process. that accelerates. New at value. Right. Yeah, absolutely. So we're going to wrap it up with, we really want our listeners to walk away from all of these conversations having learned something new. And when we think about the manufacturing sector, we had a guest at one of our events say that you can set your watch by Toyota's ongoing investment in people and culture. And if you think about the future workforce that you're trying to attract into this sector, what would you say to them? What's your elevator pitch for them to rethink what a career could look like I think the, uh, I think one of the really exciting things is that our industry is going through transformation, right? And we talk a lot about the product transformation that's happening with electrification and everything with battery electric vehicles and, and, uh, that journey, um, for Toyota, uh, I think we have an acronym, it's CASE, right? So it's connected, it's autonomous, it's service and it's electrified, right? Those are kind of aspects of this, uh, this new mobility future. Um, that it talks a lot about product. But we're also transforming the process. We're also transforming how we produce things and how manufacturing needs to be advanced to be able to build that future product. Pretty exciting, right? There's lots going on that they can get involved in. And in our case, we want people to participate. We want them to bring their ideas. A lot of times it's about mine, not money, right? We need you to think about how to make your process better. There's waste in everything that we do. So you can remove it without spending a lot of money, but sometimes you need automation or you need some improvement that requires a bit of investment. We're okay to do that too. Yeah. Well, that's great. I think that's a great key takeaway that sometimes that little bit of investment can take you much further than you ever imagined. So thank you so much for being here, Frank. We really appreciate it and have a great afternoon. Thank you. Glad to be here. That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening to Toronto Talks. Make sure you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And don't forget to keep talking Toronto. Our voice drives meaningful change.