A Driver’s Idea, a Simpler Route, and What It Says About How Abdul Latif Jameel Motors Operates
Abdullah Osman Abdi was not a manager or an engineer. He was a driver at a Toyota showroom and service center on Madinah Road in Jeddah – Saudi Arabia, responsible for moving customer vehicles between the facility and the central stock yard. He had no formal authority over the yard’s layout, no budget to work with, and no particular mandate to improve anything beyond the task in front of him. He noticed a problem anyway. The dedicated lanes assigned to the Madinah Road branch at the National Distribution Center in Al Khomrah were positioned more than 150 meters from the main exit gate. For a team of drivers moving 20 to 40 cars each day through blistering Saudi heat, that distance added 10 to 15 minutes of walking per vehicle. Across approximately 600 vehicle movements a month, the wasted time was considerable. Abdullah raised the issue with his manager, Abdulaziz Salah Atarji, the branch’s sales manager. Atarji took it up the chain to the distribution center’s management. The lanes were reassigned to a location far closer to the exit. The difference was immediate. “What used to take three to four hours is now being done in 15 minutes,” Abdullah said. The result earned him formal…
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