The celebration was one for the books. The greatly anticipated Shape Guangzhou grand opening ceremony took place on Tuesday, February 21. This was an incredible milestone for Shape and the event was a huge success. Around 70 people attended the event from Shape US, Shape China, our customers DFL, NCIC and Toyota, and local government in Tanbu town, as well as all associates from the Shape Guangzhou plant. Before the ceremony, Mark White, president, shared our vision to build a unique and special company which improves and enhances the lives of our associates, our customers and the communities in which we live and work. Patrick Sullivan, general manager, shared Shape’s commitment to delivering the same level of performance from Shape Guangzhou as our customers have come to know and expect with Shape’s brand promise. The speeches kept flowing with sentiments shared by Sumi Li, deputy general manager from DFL and the Major of Tanbu Town. A traditional performance of drum and lion dancing opened the ribbon cutting. Mark White shared the honor with Patrick Sullivan, Nakayama-san, Purchasing SAO from RNPO, Haigan Wei, Deputy Purchasing General Manager from GTMC, Weiyu Zhou, Town Major and Wensheng Wang, Deputy Town Major from Tanbu Town. After the ceremony, attendees were invited to partake in a plant tour and luncheon to learn a little more about Shape. Congratulations to Shape Guangzhou on a successful event. This celebration truly displays your hard work and dedication to Shape.

The Bluegrass Automotive Manufacturing Association (BAMA) bi-annual Learning Conference brought together executive level leaders from numerous tier-one Toyota suppliers. The conference highlights each region’s development and training packages over the last two years. Organizations can then adopt the new content, share it within their organizations and leverage the learnings to help to build momentum. Daric Morell, director of manufacturing, presented to five groups of roughly 25 participants regarding Shape’s lean journey. “It was great. We had a lot of attendance. It was really cool to see different people from different backgrounds and different companies go through the process of trying to find the problem we were able to create. It was really fun,” said Ryan DeBoer, 1900 plant manager. Shape received great feedback from attendees, highlighting that the problem solving activity in conjunction with Daric’s message about our transformation was eye opening to leaders of other companies. “I think everyone who took our training session saw how powerful it is to use moment by moment problem solving, and really finding the point of occurrence before you start down your five why problem solving tree,” said Ryan. The power of the SPS program at Shape keeps people engaged in our lean journey. Congratulations to Ryan DeBoer, Jay Blanchard, continuous improvement manager, and Daric Morell, director of manufacturing on the honor of being asked by the OMDD team to teach with them, side by side. This is definitely a feather in Shape’s hat.

After completing the challenging course design and development workshop in November, Shape China conducted delivery skills training for new trainers by master trainer Jerry Zuo. The training focused on adult learning theory, teaching skills (including verbal and non-verbal skills), as well as presentation and feedback skills to help the participants deeply understand how to be an excellent trainer. At the end of the course, the participants were encouraged to utilize a mind-map to summarize what they learned from the training. For the action learning, the participants were required to pass a teaching demo by using the skills they learned. Ken Zong and Nick Li attended the training and successfully passed the demo with valuable feedback from certified trainers, and finally were certified as internal trainers. Now, we have an internal training team with 19 people including 6 managers who lead the way in talent development.