...1 Overview Toyota is the most popular car manufacturer in the world. The reputation of its high-quality surpasses the largest car manufacture, General Motors. However, an accident due to uncontrolled acceleration occurred and it jeopardized drivers. Toyota had to recall about 10 million cars from the United States and Europe. It had to stop the production of its cars, including a new-model car until the car was repaired. The problem was that Toyota didn’t know why the uncontrolled acceleration accident happened. During 2009, its sales declined, while General Motors increased its growth. Even though Toyota’s sales declined at that time, it recovered its customer’s trust: up to 35 percent from 2009. Although the problem seemed to be getting better, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood decided to collect money from the company as a fine. Payment of the fine was not an important problem for the company because it earned enough to cover it. The serious problem was its reputation. Toyota is considered not being honest about the problem of car function that caused the car accident. Since then, specialists from NASA and the National Academy of Science have taken action to solve the problem that caused the uncontrolled acceleration accident. Akiko Toyota, the Toyota president, said that listening carefully to customers is very important to get their trust back. Q1. What is your recommendation for how Toyota should approach this situation? My suggestion for Toyota is that it announces...
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...Research Question: Have the recent recalls effected Toyotas brand image? Product Description: We, as a group, chose this topic because Toyotas main slogan consists of ‘The Best Built Cars in The World’ despite having numerous recalls over the past number of years. This really appealed to us and we wanted to see how the recalls have effected potential customers of Toyota cars in Ireland. Toyota spent 33 days as the no.1 news story worldwide (24/7 wall st). We hope to learn if this negative news coverage has effected Toyotas market share in Ireland, along with Ireland’s overall view of Toyota as a brand. With this, we want to research new cars sales in Ireland over the past number of years and in particular around the months of February and March 2009 when the recalls for Toyotas reached their peak (Cole). With the large number of recalls, we also want to investigate if Toyota have changed their production practices and quality checks to prevent these large scale recalls from happening once again. Traditionally, this company had an essence of quality about its brand (Toyota-global.com) in Ireland and we want to see what Toyota Ireland is currently doing to reassure their target market that the recalls were a mere blip in the company’s overall history and Toyota are still reliable as they ever were. Along with new car sales, we also want to research the second-hand car market in Ireland and see what is Toyota’s market place is there. We felt this is important because a significant...
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...Critically evaluating a business response Introduction Between 2009 and 2011, the Toyota recall crisis has aroused massive attentions, discussions and criticisms in a wide range of media circles (Piotrowski and Gray 2010). This paper will firstly review the whole crisis situation and then evaluate Toyota’s response from three different perspectives. There are many arguments about the deep root problems of Toyota’s poor reactions. This paper will only focus on two perspectives to offer recommendations. One is the corporation’s communication strategy; the other is the corporation’s crisis strategy. Case study overview Toyota Motor Corporation is one of the baggiest car manufactory in the world. It is the car industry leader on both sales and production. The brand name was treated as the synonymous with good quality and safety (Kingston 2010). However, between 2009 and 2011, Toyota was experiencing sequent recalls due to its safety issues. Recalls were mainly triggered by several car accidents in U.S. The first recall was caused by the problems with floor mats that might trap accelerator pedals in November 2009. But the crisis did not end there. Toyota continually conducted more recalls due to wide range reasons. The problems include sticky gas pedals, software glitches, steering control and fuel leakage. Before February 2011, there were nineteen separate recalls and encompassed over twenty million cars in total within different car models (Cole 2011). Toyota’s initial response...
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...concerned about the recall event which happened on the world’s largest vehicle manufacturers, Toyota. This event affect all over the world including China, USA, Europe. The incident makes the corporate brand image dropped and also loss the consumer confidence. Why this event did occur? During the research and analysis, the major cause of Toyota’s recall is the quality issues. For example the accelerator pedal problem, many different types of car were recalled, like RAV4, Corolla and Venza and even some very good quality cars, like Lexus. In this case, from suppliers to the manufactures all have quality problems. 1.1 Suppliers Because pursue the maximum benefits and cost minimization, suppliers pay more attention on how to reduce cost. This lead to them neglects the raw materials quality. On the other hand, due to the Toyota over-confidence suppliers, the supplier changed the components’ design without permission. Some information pointed out that one of the Toyota suppliers called Chicago Telephone Supply Co. (CTS) changed the pedal design that is one of the reasons leading to the pedal problem. (Bernard Simon, 2010) 1.2 Manufactures They used the problem components to product without quality check and after the production they also did not do better quality check. They design also have some problems, they did not do enough test of their design before they produced. All these result the recall incident. This kind of things indicates that Toyota lack of an effective quality control...
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...Model Car Company Company Overview and analysis: Model Car Company manufacturing and design mainly in Japan. This is consider one of the largest company in the world. Annually their income two hundred thirteen Billion dollar and employed over three lakh People. This company compete in the market past five years tremendously. Because consumer liking this car one of the most low fuel efficient cars. Model Car Company manufacturing all over the world such as USA, UK, Canada,Brazil,Australia,SouthAfrica,Indonesia,Japan,China,Taiwan,India,Pakistan,Turkey,Mexico , Philippines and Bangladesh . Model Car Company researching into investing and promoting hybrid synergy drive to capture the major market shares in developed countries. Their sale decrease in 2008, the massive recall defective of production. Model Car Company continuously improvement their manufacturing process as well as their product for customers , more cost effective and affordable, try to solving the root problems of organizational learning and add more value developing their people and partners. That’s why Model Car Company able to achieve this target by selling 12.1 million vehicles in June, 2011 compared to 11.6 million vehicles, 4.3% increase in sales (Trudell, 2011, June 2). Market Segment: The Company mainly divided into three business segment. The automobile segment involve in the manufacture, design and the sale of the car products including the minivans, trucks and passenger cars related to their parts...
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...Continuous Improvement Jordan Barnes MBA 6022 Cause and Effect Diagram As shown, there are four main causes for Toyota's poor top to bottom communication and slow response. The first is the flawed company structure. Because Toyota is ran by an all male group of Japanese men, there is a cultural disconnect with the parts of their business outside of Japan. This also creates a bottom to top fear complex, where car dealers fear the consequences of sending up bad news or a bad report. Furthermore, there is only one central hub where decisions are made (which is in Japan) and this can easily slow down response times to problems. The second cause is Toyota's poor risk management strategy or lack thereof. With no risk management team or effective plan in place, the car dealers have no clear plan of action regarding multiple issues or multiple car defects. The third cause focuses on the company’s misconstrued core values. Toyota's values were ordered as Safety, Quality, and Volume. But when the want to be the best in the industry became the need to be the best, volume became the most important value. Quality and, subsequently, safety fell behind. The last cause was the company’s manufacturing system. When Toyota set out to beat GM in the automobile industry, they had one goal in mind: having the most cars on the road. They managed to accomplish this but it was at the expense of quality. The new suppliers they started working with had cheaper cost. This allowed them to save money...
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...Toyota Company Name University Affiliation History and back ground of Toyota Motor Corporation Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese automobile company that came into existence in 1937. This company was established mainly to manufacture automobile after the founder had traveled to Europe and the US to investigate how to manufacture gasoline powered engine (Kalb, 2012). The company came into existence because there was a need to develop a local automobile by Japan since the government needed domestic automobile production units because it had war with China (Meyer, 2015). The company produced its first engine known as Type A engine which was used in its first models of passenger and truck vehicles. In 1950, a separate Toyota Motor sales company was established to deal mainly with the marketing of the Toyota car products. This separate company lasted until 1982. In the 1950s, the Toyopet dealer chain has established a chain which specialized in the production of Toyopet Model SA; by 1957, Toyota Company managed to start exporting its car products to other parts of the world such as Australia, United States, and Europe (Kalb, 2012). In 1982, Toyota Motors Company and Toyota Motor Sales merged forming one company known as Toyota Motor Corporation. The company started establishing new brands of vehicles that surpassed the brands of the competitors (Kalb, 2012). In the 1990s towards the new century, the company started to branch out by adding many larger and luxurious vehicles...
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...important role in a company, which is why I chose the company Toyota. Toyota offers a full line of products for just about every need and lifestyle such as cars, trucks, SUV’s, hybrids, motorcycles and minivans. Toyota a massive car empire manufactures vehicles every day; this company has 53 production sites in 27 countries around the world (Piotrowski Chris 2010). In the fiscal year 2009 Toyota sold approximately 7.5 million vehicles worldwide in about 170 countries under the Toyota, Daihatsu, and Hino brands which ranked them as the 5th largest company in the world (Piotrowski Chris 2010). In 2005, Toyota was 8th on the Forbes list of over 2000 leading world companies but due to a largely financial crisis in 2008 the company had an enormous debt and had to borrow 3 billion dollars to keep on producing (Piotrowski Chris 2010). “A fatal car crash in Southern California in August 2009 led to the start of a massive recall” (Andrews Anthony P 2011). This lead to the entire reason of the terrible human resource management Toyota had to deal with the recall, they did handled the entire recall poorly. Toyota did not act quick enough to the public about the information of the mechanical failures of the vehicles which led to a fine by the US government of 16 million dollars in addition Toyota had to deal with massive public pressure and legal lawsuits (Andrews Anthony P 2011). The mechanical issues decimating the Toyota models and the car failures were not the entire reason of terrible...
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...TOYOTA, INC. A Case Study in Communicating Bad News Written by: Alex Mezey Scott Hamilton Kevin Kuwahara Courtney Sandlin Dr. Robyn Walker Faculty Advisor Center for Management Communication Prepared for: Case Study Initiative Center for Management Communication 2013 Page 1 of 12 INTRODUCTION In 2005, Lupe Lee bought a new Toyota Camry from a local Sunnyvale, California, Toyota dealership, donating her immaculate Camry bought in 1990 to a local charity. Going from an older Camry model to a newer one, it was obvious that Lupe not only liked Camry cars, but she liked Toyota and its business model. However, this was all about to change on September 9, 2011. On this day, Lupe and her daughter were on their way to Berkeley for a niece’s wedding. They planned to stop in Burlingame to pick up Lupe’s sister, Rose. They arrived at the sister’s apartment early, so Lupe and her daughter went inside. After visiting in the apartment for a time, the three of them went out to get into the Camry to continue on to Berkeley. Lupe would have to make a U-turn to head back towards the freeway. Instead, she decided to maneuver into a nearby driveway to turn around. This is when things began to go horribly wrong; as they started up the driveway, the car began accelerating. Rose exclaimed “Lupe! What are you doing!? Why are you going so fast!? Push on the brake!” Lupe had no control of the car; she was terrified. She tried desperately to press the brake, but nothing happened. She quickly...
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...Kyla Patillo Toyota in a Crisis Crisis Management Toyota is a well-known brand throughout the auto industry. The innovative Japanese company is famous for its car models such as the Camry, Corolla, and even the Lexus. Toyota U.S.A. first got their start in October 1937 in a once was Rambler dealership in Hollywood, California. In 1958 they began selling a few different models and in 1989 began their own brand of luxury cars where the Lexus was first introduced. Unique models and satisfactory customer service put Toyota in the top three bestselling automobile companies in America. Things were looking great for Toyota with wide economic growth they had little complaints, and even in a recession sales were still booming. With things going so well for Toyota why invest in crisis prevention? Toyota was soon going to find its answer to that very question. On August 8th, 2009, Mark Saylor-an off duty patrol man and three members of his family were driving close to Santee, California in his Lexus. All of a sudden the Lexus began to accelerate exceeding 100mph, one of the occupants called 911 reporting frantically that the Lexus “had no brakes,” seconds later the car crashed and caught fire claiming the lives of everyone inside. The birth of the Toyota crisis concerning the sticky gas pedals had begun. Toyota did not have much to say on the incident, instead of immediately creating an investigation to find out exactly why this happened and addressing the issue Toyota summed it up...
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...its cars, Toyota Motor Corporation faces a corporate crisis of epic proportions. What happened at the car company that had finally achieved the title of world’s largest car maker? (It overtook General Motors in 2008.) What factors contributed to the mess it now found itself in? At the core of Toyota’s manufacturing process is the Toyota Production System (TPS), which has long been touted and revered as a model of corporate efficiency and quality. Four management principles (the 4P model) were at the core of TPS and guided employees: problem solving, people and partners, process, and philosophy. The idea behind these principles was that “Good Thinking Means Good Product.” Taiichi Ohno, a long-time Toyota executive, is widely credited as the innovative genius behind TPS. During the 1950s, Ohno, along with a small core of other Toyota executives, developed several principles of car-making efficiency that became what is now known as lean manufacturing and just-in-time inventory management. “Ohno’s ideas not only changed the auto industry, they changed late-twentieth-century manufacturing.” At the very core of these concepts were attention to detail and a “noble frugality.” However, over the years, it appears that Toyota’s executives slowly lost the “purity” of that approach as the once-strong commitment to quality embedded in Toyota’s corporate culture became lost in its aggressive moves to grow market share and achieve productivity gains. From about 1995 to 2009, Toyota embarked on...
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...With a worldwide recall of some 8 million cars and 51 deaths that U.S. regulators say have been caused by mechanical failures in its cars, Toyota Motor Corporation faces a corporate crisis of epic proportions.58 What happened at the car company that had finally achieved the title of world’s largest car maker? (It overtook General Motors in 2008.) What factors contributed to the mess it now found itself in? At the core of Toyota’s manufacturing prowess is the Toyota Production System (TPS), which has long been touted and revered as a model of corporate efficiency and quality. Four management principles (the 4P model) were at the core of TPS and guided employees: problem solving, people and partners, process, and philosophy. The idea behind these principles was that “Good Thinking Means Good Product.” Taiichi Ohno, a long-time Toyota executive, is widely credited as the innovative genius behind TPS. During the 1950s, Ohno, along with a small core of other Toyota executives, developed several principles of car-making efficiency that became what is now known as lean manufacturing and just-in-time inventory management. “Ohno’s ideas not only changed the auto industry, they changed late-twentieth-century manufacturing.” At the very core of these concepts were attention to detail and a “noble frugality.” However, over the years, it appears that Toyota’s executives slowly lost the “purity” of that approach as the once-strong commitment to quality embedded in Toyota’s...
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...its cars, Toyota Motor Corporation faces a corporate crisis of epic proportions. What happened at the car company that had finally achieved the title of world’s largest car maker? (It overtook General Motors in 2008.) What factors contributed to the mess it now found itself in? At the core of Toyota’s manufacturing prowess is the Toyota Production System (TPS), which has long been touted and revered as a model of corporate efficiency and quality. Four management principles (the 4P model) were at the core of TPS and guided employees: problem solving, people and partners, process, and philosophy. The idea behind these principles was that “Good Thinking Means Good Product.” Taiichi Ohno, a long-time Toyota executive, is widely credited as the innovative genius behind TPS. During the 1950s, Ohno, along with a small core of other Toyota executives, developed several principles of car-making efficiency that became what is now known as lean manufacturing and just-in-time inventory management. “Ohno’s ideas not only changed the auto industry, they changed late-twentieth-century manufacturing.” At the very core of these concepts were attention to detail and a “noble frugality.” However, over the years, it appears that Toyota’s executives slowly lost the “purity” of that approach as the once-strong commitment to quality embedded in Toyota’s corporate culture became lost in its aggressive moves to grow market share and achieve productivity gains. From about 1995 to 2009, Toyota embarked on...
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...For this discussion, review the case study Toyota Motor Manufacturing, U.S.A., Inc. (1995) by Mishina and the article "What Really Happened to Toyota?" by Cole (2011). Then, respond to the following questions: * If you were Doug Friesen, manager of assembly at the company's Georgetown, Kentucky, plant, what would you do to address the seat problem? Where would you focus your attention and solution efforts? As Doug Friesen, my first instinct would be to question the quality control of the plant. Quality control knew it had to meet certain safety standards to pass crash performance, they also knew the feel had to be met to customer standards without any standards to follow. Final assembly identified the seats as soft and prone to damage but also bulky. Being that the seat is the most expensive part, there should be standards in all areas, including how the seats feel. AS Doug Friesen, I would also take responsibility for not being aware of the problem until I return from Japan. I would focus my attention and solution efforts on changing the existing process for inspecting the seats and being sure to implement standards in all areas of verifying the seats quality. I would also want to focus on how many cars were in overflow, in order to turn the problem around as quickly as possible. * What options exist? What would you recommend? Why? When considering the options for the seat problem I would recommend doing the following; First option would be to increase the quality control...
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...system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization from other organizations” (Judge, 2011). Toyota’s ‘insular arrogant culture’, and the fact they were they makers of the faulty vehicles that had to be recalled was what caused them to be blamed for the unintended acceleration issue. According to the case: “Fortune argued: ‘Like GM before it Toyota has gotten smug. It believes the Toyota Way is the only Way.’ ” Additionally it states that, “Times reported, ‘A Toyota management team that had fallen in love with itself and become too insular to properly handle something like the current crisis.’ ” (Judge S. P., 2013) Insular arrogant culture means that management rarely took into consideration the feedback from the customers or employees and they were in denial of peril and risk and cling to its arrogance (calling it confidence) for as long as possible. 2. Reports indicate that investigations have shown that after stories of unintended acceleration are published reports of incidents increased for all automakers. This was so because automobile owners resorted to blaming the faults of vehicles on the automakers. Because it was publicized that Toyota was the cause of incidents, anytime something similar happened to drivers of even a different make of vehicle they blamed the maker. 3. It is possible to have a strong - even arrogant - culture and still produce safe and high quality vehicles since these organizational characteristics do not necessarily...
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