1-Description of the organization
The Japanese company, Toyota, is a multinational automotive manufacturing company having headquarter in Toyota city Aichi, Japan. Toyota industries introduced the company on August 28, 1937, by Kiichiro Toyoda. The company is known for the manufacturing of reliable cars and Toyota vehicles have gained outstanding records for providing durable and reliable offers. The principal focus of the company is to provide comfort, safety, and convenience to its customers. The production units of Toyota are 10,418,144 units. Toyota Motor Corporation manufactures innovative and luxurious vehicles including cars, motorcycles, and trucks under five brands including Hino, Lexus, Ranz, Daihatsu, and Toyota brand. Net revenues of Toyota are approximately 29.4 trillion Japanese yen in the fiscal year of 2018. The concern of Toyota is to generate an effective simultaneous implementation of intensive growth strategies as well as a general strategy. In the case of generic strategy, the company determines the overall approach of the global automotive industry. On the contrary, in the case of intensive growth strategies, the main focus of Toyota is to ensure the continued growth of the market. The implementation of the marketing plan and strategies of Toyota the main concern is to develop technological innovation, hybrid vehicles, and gain of international markets. The strategic goal of Toyota is to introduce a strategic shift of technology towards electrification.
2-Operations Strategy
The sustainable strategy of Toyota is to increase the eagerness of experimental help. The company, at all levels, has a focus on logical relationships and obvious transparency in the work. Different types of levels are associated with development strategies such as differentiation and relevance of manufacturing programs. The operation strategies of Toyota are mainly associated with the production system, technology and quality, welfare cost of employees, hybrid vehicles, and satisfaction of the customer. The well-known strategies of Toyota include Lean Production or Toyota Production System (TPS). Toyota Motors led to certain unfavorable changes regarding management practices and the change in the supply chain. The core values of Toyota are changing with the massive recall of unique strategies. The evaluation in strategies is evident in the manufacturing process, technical divisions are changing manufacturing process of direct injection gasoline engines, elemental technologies in the fuel cells, rubber recycling process, hybrid synergy drive (HSD), planetary gear system, Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor for Hybrid Vehicles (IGBT), and plugin hybrid cars. The change is observed in the electrical grids, external electrical power sources in the conventional hybrid engine vehicles (Andrews, 2011).
3-Decision Making Process and Innovation
The operation strategy of Toyota is associated with business strategy and operation functions. The focus is on the capabilities of operations and competitive edge of the company. The long-term strategy of Toyota involves regional models of cars and global models of automobiles. A happy workplace is created by Toyota to improve the production system of the company. managers avoid opposing changes in the current process. The company strives for improved quality production and manufacturing process. Sustainable growth is observed in the company due to innovation-driven policies. Toyota has developed different methods of innovation that is related to corporate culture. Toyota believes in investing in effective solutions for resource utilization. Toyota is taking initiatives to protect the environment and society; therefore, Toyota encourages innovation in technology and manufacturing process. The corporate social responsibility policy (CSR) in Toyota is related to the “Contribution towards sustainable development”. The focus of Toyota is not only on the maximization of profits but contributes to the welfare of the environment and society. Toyota maintains equilibrium in the needs of consumers and society. In March 2011, Toyota introduced the global vision and launched the concept of “Always better cars”. In the Toyota global vision, the primary focus is CSR (Enriching lives of the community) and profit maximization (Always better cars).
4-Products and Services Design
Toyota industries corporations are engaged in a variety of business such as manufacturing of automobile including vehicles, car electronics, car air-conditioning system, engines, textile machinery, and material handling equipment. Toyota offers services for repairing and spare parts of automobiles. The other services of Toyota are Banking, leasing, and financing. The financial services are provided through Toyota Financial Services divisions and develop different robots. Sales services are also provided for electronically controlled automatic vehicles. The biggest challenge faced by Toyota is the development in information technology. A 50% reduction is observed in the inventory of Toyota in the last three years. The technical challenges of Toyota are designing of data warehouse and data integrity related to the depository. Another challenge of Toyota is implementation of different solutions through T and TPS system. The e-business marketplace needs to be improved. Certain development phases are coordinated and integrated into Toyota. The planning and development processes have a critical role in the business of automotive. The development phases of the basic research define technological development in the production process and Toyota is taking serious, rapid and continuous development processes for the appealing, cutting edge, and high-quality vehicles.
5-Process Design
Toyota Motors Company is highly concerned with the accuracy of their operations. Considering this managerial staff is used to evaluating and measuring all business processes constantly. From the manufacturing process to supply chain process, the company has monitoring and evaluation systems through which managers evaluate overall cost, error ratio, and profitability. Moreover, the company is following performance appraisal systems and benchmarking techniques to measure performance outcomes of the workforce. While process designing engineer’s work in the organization to monitor the system engineering and manufacturing process to find errors and problems to be removed (Bt-forklifts.com, 2019). As a result of this, manufacturing and retail facilities are working properly to support business processes. Toyota Company follows up the strategy of long-term positive relationship building with suppliers to get cost-advantages and better operations. Toyota culture of continuous improvement is a reason for many changes and improvements in the business processes. According to research, proposals for improvement made by Toyota Company in its European Toyota Material Handling production site are more than 3000. According to (Bensinger & Vartabedian, 2009) Toyota, the motor company improved its car foot mat production process in 2009 when the company received feedback of continuous break failure because of poor mat design.
6-Value Chain
Toyota Motor Company is an advocate of the value chain concept. Toyota management is with the point of view that customer satisfaction also depends upon the way supplier or dealers deal with them. Moreover, they consider that the organization can bring betterment by adding value to the supply chain. A better relationship with supplier directly benefits a company. Toyota provides discounts, incentives and special offers to their supply intermediaries in order to get a competitive position in the market (Taylor, 2017). Other than retailers and dealers, the company is also focused on positive relationship management with suppliers from those companies purchase raw material of fiber, plastic, and paints to get high-quality products at affordable prices. Basically, Supply chain of Toyota Company starts from suppliers and ends at outlet retailers.
Figure 1 Supply Chain
Somehow, there are some areas of the supply chain that need to be improved. For instance, Toyota Company is not highly focused on online car retailers. Even the company does not have an appropriate online platform to show and sell their new models (Hearnshaw & Wilson, 2013). In accordance with my suggestion, the company needs to bring improvement in e-retailing as now e-retailing is more trendy than physical stores.
7-Planning and Control
Toyota Motors Company is highly concerned about waste management. Considering this Toyota only manufactures optimal level of inventory. Managerial staff monitor market demand to forecast future sales. The manufacturing department has the responsibility to manufacture cars according to the sales forecast for a specified period of time. Toyota Motors Company follows the Just-in-time (JIT) approach in the production sector to keep inventory at the optimal level. According to a research study, at the end of the month, Toyota usually has only 3% remaining inventory. Moreover, the sales department conducts market research and uses historical data for forecasting future demand for vehicles in the overseas and domestic market. In short, demand forecasting approaches used by Toyota Company are survey methods and statistical methods of demand forecasting.
Top level management of Toyota Company takes corporate level decisions and develops long term plans for organizational operations. While on the other hand, bottom level management develops short term plans to execute these long-term plans. Examples of long-term planning increase in annual net income and short-term plan are to increase sales by 3% per week. The company has an appropriate feedback and control system. Customers can visit outlets and send their feedback about product quality. The feedback system can be improved by providing online platforms for feedback such as the social media platform.
8-Quality Management
Toyota Motors Company is using Lean Six Sigma to improve value-added steps and eliminate non-value-added actions and strategies. Moreover, the management of Toyota Company has also implemented 8 wastage elimination lean management approach in the organization (Qimacros.com, 2019). According to this company, is reducing wastes caused by over-processing, defects or errors in production, excess of inventory, excess processing, overproduction, waiting, extra motion, the non-utilized talent of employees, and transportation. All these kind of wastes are known as non-valued added activities that can be eliminated through lean six sigma. Company is following continues quality improvement system. Market research, process engineer’s suggestions, feedback collected from market surveys and supplier’s feedback from outlets are the main sources to get information about the requirement of quality in products and services. The company uses this kind of information to bring betterment in the quality. According to my recommendations, Toyota Company should create an online portal to collect information about customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction thus in the light of this collected information they would be able to bring betterment in their quality aspects in such a way that would increase customer satisfaction. Somehow, my personal suggestion is to focus on airbag recalls problem as it caused the company to face a big loss in the targeted market.
References
Andrews, A. P. (2011). The Toyota crisis: an economic, operational and strategic analysis of the massive recall. Management research Review, 34(10), 1064-1077.
Bensinger, K., & Vartabedian, R. (2009). Toyota to fix ‘very dangerous’ gas pedal defects. Retrieved from www.latimes.com: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-nov-26-la-fi-toyota-recall26-2009nov26-story.html
Bt-forklifts.com. (2019). Kaizen . Retrieved from www.bt-forklifts.com: http://www.bt-forklifts.com/En/company/BTProduction/TPS/Kaizen/Pages/default.aspx
Hearnshaw, E. J., & Wilson, M. M. (2013). A complex network approach to supply chain network theory. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 33(4), 442-469.
Qimacros.com. (2019). Lean Six Sigma. Retrieved from www.qimacros.com: https://www.qimacros.com/lean-six-sigma-articles/lean-six-sigma/
Taylor, J. (2017). Toyota’s Supply Chain Management. Retrieved from www.essaytyping.com: https://www.essaytyping.com/toyotas-supply-chain-management/
