After nearly two decades from the start of the 21st Century, the Toyota Motor Corporation (or just better known as, Toyota) has played the critical role as a leading automotive manufacturing producer, as well to possess an excellent leadership position in the business industry in general. As technology continues to improve from time to time, auto manufacturers have always worked to prevent a major crisis from happening within the industry. Such events may include product recalls, production disruptions, supply-chain inefficiency, labor disputes, and pressure from other competitors.
Despite such concern, Toyota aims to maintain product superiority and consumer loyalty to its brand. However, it is unrealistic for a company to perform at such a perfect rate. Since 2007, Toyota has begun to experience a pattern of product recalls of their top-selling line-up, including the Camry, Prius, and Corolla vehicles.
According to consumer experiences, these models were marked with severe defects such as uncontrollable acceleration, steering malfunctions, brake system defects, and software glitches.
It wasn’t until 2010 in which a recall crisis was inevitable, in which nearly “8 million cars were retrieved by the company and it would take over $2 billion to handle the repair costs”. It was on this year that the issue was officially made public and caught the attention of both the media and U.S. regulatory agencies to conduct a congressional investigation on the company. But even after such an event, the company seeks to learn from its mistakes. Since 2001, the “Toyota Way” model summarizes its business philosophy that stresses problem-solving, respect for all people (customer and co-worker alike), teamwork processing, and mentoring of personnel from a long-term outlook.
As former Toyota President, Fujio Cho, explain in forward to these philosophies: “It is essential that our global leadership team embrace the concepts of the Toyota Way as we achieve our business goals in host countries that have a wide variety of customs, traditions and business practices. I urge every Toyota team member all over the world to take professional and personal responsibility for advancing the understanding and acceptance of the Toyota Way.” (Liker, 2008, p. 60-61) In a sense, the recall crisis had spawned a message that company employees should exert these words into their production and managerial practices with serious effort. This study will look over the company and determine whether it has lived up to its name and guarantee worker and customer benefits by answering a few questions
Always Striving For Improvement. (2021, Dec 15). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/always-striving-for-improvement/