Jerusha Naidoo

I've spent over 18 years at Toyota South Africa, supporting high-volume automotive manufacturing across production engineering, quality, strategic planning, and plant launches.

I supported the successful Toyota Corolla Cross launch through quality engineering for paint exterior body colour, seats, and door panels, managing parts approvals, supplier quality, audits, and corrective actions. More recently, I helped establish Toyota South Africa's first Electro-Deposition Chassis Facility, supporting process capability, quality adherence, SOP readiness, and ramp-up.

My work includes plant capacity planning, equipment optimisation, cost reduction, Factory of the Future initiatives, risk mitigation, and cross-functional alignment using Toyota Business Practice and Nemawashi.

Earlier in the Assembly Plant, I led process engineering, line balancing, defect and scrap reduction, and Kaizen activities. I've also gained international manufacturing exposure at Toyota's Motomachi Plant in Japan during New Hilux 640 production-readiness simulations.