TRW Division Finds Secret to Success in Dealing With Japanese : Trade: Cultural savvy wins Irwindale company a contract to build Camry air bag controls. It was no small feat; the firm’s competition was a Toyota affiliate.

While Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca and other Detroit auto officials complain loudly and publicly about the impossibility of working with Japanese car companies, TRW Technar Inc. in Irwindale has been quietly--and successfully--doing it for the past five years.

The local TRW plant--a subsidiary of the $8.3-billion defense and credit company based in Ohio--designs and manufactures air bag sensors and controls for Toyota Motor Corp. in Japan. The devices will be installed in 50% of Toyota Camry models produced this year and, eventually, all Camrys.

The feat is no small accomplishment. TRW’s competition was a Japanese firm, Nippon Denso--an affiliate of Toyota.

But TRW executives were able to beat the Japanese by putting in 12-hour days, coming up with a new design, persuading American parts manufacturers to meet faster supply schedules and turning out a finished product within 14 months of conception.

TRW’s coup was recognized last month by Toyota officials, who presented the Americans with a technology and development excellence award--the first given to a company outside Japan.

The Americans proudly carried back to Irwindale a three-foot-tall crystal trophy, Toyota’s prized corporate award. The trophy is proof that dealing with the Japanese simply takes cultural savvy, TRW executives said during recent interviews.

“If you have good customer service, you can do business there,” said George Downs, TRW Technar marketing director. “It’s not impossible . . . to compete in Japan, if you do business the way the Japanese like it to be done.”

TRW’s success comes at time when American auto manufacturers and parts suppliers are trying to reverse a U.S.-Japanese trade imbalance by selling more to the Japanese. Autos and auto parts make up 75% of the $41-billion U.S. trade deficit with Japan.

President Bush’s recent Asian trade trip produced at least a promise from Japan of progress toward correcting the imbalance. The Japanese, who now buy $9 billion annually of American auto parts, said they would buy $19 billion by 1994.

But TRW executives say that unless Americans learn Japanese business practices they will not succeed, despite all the promises.

Chief among those practices is the personal way the Japanese do business, said Thomas J. Doyle, TRW Technar’s vice president and general manager. Character matters more than contracts, he said.

“In our American culture, we want to go over there, sit down and talk business right away,” Doyle said. “But the Japanese want to get a sense of you. . . . When you meet with them, you have to socialize first.”

For TRW, that meant more than a year of courting the Japanese and building trust during a series of meetings and social dinners before scoring a contract in 1987.

The Japanese take longer to “get to the point” than Americans do, Doyle said. That, he said, can frustrate Americans who appear to the Japanese, in turn, to be impatient.

Once the business deal was cemented, the personal side continued. Downs was invited to Toyota executives’ homes to meet their wives, children, parents and the even in-laws. He hiked with another executive for five hours in darkness to catch the sunrise from the top of 12,304-foot-high Mt. Fujiyama.

“This goes beyond a customer-supplier relationship; you become a part of the family,” said Zaya Younan, TRW’s director of program management.

Younan said the personal bond motivated him to put in 12-hour days for the Japanese while devising the improved air bag sensor kit that won his firm the award.

TRW reduced the size of its patented Rolamite sensor--a metal cylinder that rolls forward in a crash and closes an electric circuit--and its gas-damped sensor, a tiny cup with a metal plate. Together, the sensors discern, within a few milliseconds, whether a crash is severe enough to inflate an air bag.

Both parts and their electrical components fit into a metal compartment about the size of a sandwich. It eliminates the previous bulky arrangement of sensors in the car front and dashboard, connected by wires.

The company will make 250,000 of the units this year for Toyota.

Another Japanese business requirement is communication. Because of a 17-hour time difference between the nations, the Japanese arrive for work just as Californians are ready to go home.

But TRW workers routinely stay late to phone the Japanese, Younan said. They also rely heavily on daily faxes and TRW employees fluent in Japanese to ensure that the Toyota people have early knowledge of any possible problems.

“One of the ways you can lose Japanese business is to let them know (about problems) after you’ve missed a shipment,” Doyle said.

“The Japanese hate surprises,” Younan added.

Working with the Japanese also takes speed, TRW executives said.

Japanese auto makers operate on a two-year time span from conception to production, whereas Americans typically take up to four years, Doyle said. That means TRW had to find American parts suppliers who could also gear up for such a pace.

Downs said he startled some American manufacturers at meetings when he abruptly closed his briefcase once he learned suppliers could not meet the Japanese deadlines. The suppliers were startled again when TRW refused to negotiate. It was because they had no time to do so.

“A deadline in Japan is a deadline, and they have no flexibility,” Younan said.

But the payoff in doing business with the admittedly demanding Japanese is the promise of long-term business relationships with hands-on assistance, TRW executives said.

Unlike American business operators who might rebid contracts year-to-year or demand annual price reductions, the Japanese are less price conscious, Doyle said. They value staying with one company over time, he said.

The Japanese also provide technological help and advice to improve efficiency and productivity and get American companies in line with them, Younan said.

Overall, TRW executives say they have never experienced trade restrictions or other obstacles cited by Detroit auto makers. Indeed, the distinction between American-made and Japanese-made cars is fast disappearing, Doyle said.

With Toyota building Camrys in a Kentucky plant and Honda building Accords in Ohio--all while Chrysler and Mitsubishi and Ford and Mazda do business with each other, “it’s almost amorphous where a car is made,” Doyle said.