The MLOG Impact: Alumni Profiles
Derrick Redding, MLOG 2002

Derrick Redding (MLOG ’02) speaks to current MLOG students about his experience at Toyota.

Exciting and challenging - that’s how Derrick Redding (MLOG ’02) sums up his experience over the past year and a half with Toyota’s North American Operations Strategy Group.

Toyota invited Redding to join its new corporate strategy team in Cincinnati, Ohio shortly after his 2002 graduation from the Master of Engineering in Logistics Program at MIT.

“I knew a lot about Toyota from prior experience and academic research,” Redding explained. “I was very interested in the company’s team-based culture that focused on problem-solving.”

After Redding signed on, he was not disappointed. In fact, he says the job was even better than he expected. “Toyota is bringing over a lot of functions from Japan to North America, so my group has the opportunity to work on many new projects.”

One project Redding is spearheading is the development of a five-year profit forecast for North American Operations. The strategy group’s goal is to make the automaker’s profit forecast more dynamic, so Toyota can accurately predict when to launch its next vehicle in the assembly plants.

The Operations Strategy group is also developing a Kaizen Database to share important project information between all North American assembly plants. In addition, they are trying to capture and improve all costs related to vehicle launches in North America.

“What I really enjoy about Toyota is the intellectual challenge. The company is interested in the way people think about problems,” Redding said. “They value good thinking over results. They allow time for consensus building, so when its time to execute the ideas, it’s a much smoother process.”

Redding credits the MLOG program for preparing him for his job at Toyota. “In the MLOG program, I was exposed to so many really good supply chain ideas and problems.” Redding added that while corporate strategy is not necessarily a supply chain or logistics project, a huge value-add from MLOG has been the ability to manage uncertainty - a skill Redding has used on all three of his current projects.

As for the future, Redding plans to stay in corporate strategy for the next year or so, but foresees a future career move within Toyota that could land him at a plant in Japan. The 35-year-old looks forward to the move, since he has worked in Japan before and is fluent in the language.

Currently, Redding lives in Cincinnati, Ohio with his wife of seven years Yoshiko and their two sons, 5-year-old Tyler and 3-year-old Alec.

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