Texas MBEs had new reasons to smile when Toyota announced in February 2003 that it would invest $850 million in a new truck manufacturing plant in San Antonio. Part of the package was a pledge to spend 20 percent of its budget with minority suppliers.

With the factory set to open later this year, Toyota is well on its way to meeting that goal, according to Adrienne Trimble, who has been the company’s director of supplier diversity since July.

On the Mark
“I’m quite comfortable that we’re on target,” Trimble said, adding that MBE-supplied or MBE-installed products for the new plant include structural steel, concrete, various metals and even mulch.

Still, the Central & South Texas Minority Business Council has had some difficulty registering sufficient numbers of minority vendors to participate in the project. According to council president Dinah Lovett, Toyota and its Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers are dedicated to using local MBEs, but those MBEs need to be certified.

Trimble urges minority vendors interested in pursuing opportunities with the San Antonio plant to register on the company’s database at toyotasupplier.com. Toyota accepts MBE certification from the National Minority Supplier Diversity Council and its local affiliates, including the CSTMBC, which has offices in San Antonio, Austin and Harlingen.

Economic Engine
Scheduled to open later this year, Toyota already has about 400 people on its San Antonio payroll and 3.5 million square feet of plant on the ground. When fully operational, it will employ about 2,000 workers and produce 200,000 Tundra full-size pickup trucks.

San Antonio will further benefit because the 2,000-acre campus, located on the city’s economically disadvantaged south side, will house 18 on-site suppliers and bring up to 1,500 more jobs and additional $150 million investment to the area. Among those suppliers, seven are joint ventures comprised of minority-owned companies.

With the addition of a visitor’s center that Toyota is building on the site, city officials expect the project’s impact to reach much further than the nearby neighborhoods, giving many of the Alamo City’s existing businesses a boost.

Worth the Drive
The project is also boosting MBEs located outside the city. One such company is MagRabbit, an Austin-based provider of logistics software. The company is providing material procurement and logistics services to Toyota and some of its Tier-1 suppliers, including Reyes Automotive Group, Takumi Stamping and Millennium Steel.

Vietnamese-born Tommy Hodinh, who arrived in the United States in 1973 with $100 in his pocket and worked his way through college, founded MagRabbit. He was employed at IBM for 15 years before establishing the firm in 1990. He and Trimble serve on the board of directors for the CSTMBC.

MagRabbit’s relationship with Toyota began in 2002, when Hodinh attended Toyota’s annual Opportunity Exchange, an annual trade show that aims to match the company’s Tier-1 suppliers with minority suppliers. From OE’s beginning in 1990, when it attracted 100 participants, this one-day event has grown into huge confab that attracted more than 1,700 people last year and has generated contracts worth more than $100 million.

Hodinh left the OE with a Toyota Tier-1 supplier directory and asked his sales and marketing team to call potential clients on the list.

“We called 250-plus prospects and, within 30 days, we started doing business with several Toyota Tier-1 suppliers,” Hodinh said. “Today we have approximately 40 Toyota [Tier-1 suppliers] as clients. We owe a lot to the entire Toyota supplier diversity team.”

“Our relationship with Toyota has been instrumental as we seek business with other clients, because companies realize that Toyota holds its suppliers to a very high standard,” he added.

Forward Momentum
Toyota has declined to reveal its MBE spend for the San Antonio plant until the project is completed, but on a national level, it hit the $1 billion mark with minority Tier-1 business in 2004. In 2005, the company was inducted into the Billion Dollar Roundtable, an elite group of corporations whose MBE spend has reached $1 billion. In 2004, the NMSDC named Toyota its Corporation of the Year.

“There are many factors that went into this accomplishment, from the hard work of our team members to the top support of Toyota management.” Trimble said. “Ultimately, though, it was made possible by the excellent quality of a growing group of minority suppliers.”