Toyota to Slash 45,000 Technical Terms to 5,000 Using AI, Boosting End-to-End Collaboration

Toyota Motor Corporation plans to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to consolidate and streamline the 45,000 specialized component-related terms currently used across its planning, production, and sales departments into just 5,000 standardized, universal terms. At present, different departments use inconsistent naming conventions for the same parts—for example, a component labeled “A1AC without audio system” by the planning department might be recorded as “136S” in the production system. Moreover, a single part can have multiple descriptions depending on vehicle model and manufacturing stage. The end-to-end process—from vehicle planning to delivery—involves 560 steps, with 195 of them (roughly 30% of the total) requiring cross-departmental terminology translation, spanning 800 separate business systems. Employees collectively spend approximately 310,000 hours annually on terminology conversion tasks alone. This issue stems from Toyota’s 1950 split into separate sales and manufacturing companies, which led each division to independently develop its own data recording systems. Although the two entities merged again in 1982, their divergent terminology standards persisted, resulting in today’s complex and redundant information architecture. Since 2021, Toyota has been implementing a project called OMUSVI (Organized Master Unified System for Vehicle Information), aiming to build an integrated system covering the entire value chain from planning to sales, with full operational synergy targeted by 2028. The new system will incorporate AI to automatically standardize terminology and enable real-time sharing of vehicle-related information—allowing, for instance, the sales department to monitor production progress and significantly enhancing cross-functional collaboration. Additionally, the system will interface directly with annual production planning, automatically generating required component volumes and transmitting this data to suppliers. Currently, suppliers must manually calculate their annual capacity allocations for配套 parts—a task that, for some companies, consumes up to 720 hours per year. In the future, annual planning documents will include detailed specifications and quantities for all components. Initial implementation faced resistance from various departments concerned about potential job cuts, slowing progress. However, momentum accelerated after then-President Koji Sato publicly endorsed the initiative in March 2024. Once fully deployed, the system is expected to substantially improve overall supply chain efficiency.