Toyota Manufacturing Options

Manufacturing Options Integrated Supply Chain Management
BUS631
Matthew Keogh

Toyota is one of the largest automobile manufacturers in the world today, until recently, they were renowned for the quality of their product and for developing the “Toyota Way” of manufacturing, “Just in Time” (JIT) pull supply chain strategy, and the “Total Quality Management” concepts (Simchi-Levi, Kaminsky & Simchi, 2008). This paper addresses their basic manufacturing concepts, supply chain, current ideas and programs. Furthermore, this paper shows Toyota continued improvement; and how one of the six options from table 6.1 in the text would have the greatest impact on the company. The “Toyota Way” is a philosophy as much as it is a plan for manufacturing and their mindset is to challenge workers along with management personnel to do more than just the basics of their job. Instead to think, consider, and always look for ways to improve overall company performance. Several reports published in the 1980’s indicate that Japanese base company like Toyota achieve the highest level of manufacturing in the world when one talks about the automobile industry (Cusumano, 1988). This manufacturing plan when first created was a new way of approaching workers, managers, processes, inventory management, supply chains, and customer satisfaction. The strategy was so successful that the rest of the global manufactures wanted to emulate and adopt their strategies. Toyota prospered and grew so large and so confident in their system senior management started to believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy of their success and they expanded their manufacturing globally before adequately training their workforce. Toyota conducts its business worldwide with 52 overseas manufacturing companies in 27 countries and regions. The complexity in their manufacturing is technically advanced and the supply system is very complex as they use a nearly pure JIT supply system in the upper areas of their supply chain. They have been so successful at integrating their supply chain when they decided to rationalize it they reduced their suppliers for many critical parts down to sole source partners. The earthquakes and the tsunami caused Japan billions of dollars loss in their global network when the sole source parts fell short due to natural disasters; and their factory could proceed to the finished product stage without these parts. Toyota has rebounded from this and corrected their supply chain only to suffer from massive recalls because of quality of product issues. Toyota management is convinced that the reduction in quality is due to the lack of training in the entire organization but in the overseas plants in particular caused by rapid expansion with poor training of management and workers in their specific skill area as well as in understanding the system that they are working in. They have built a 40,000 square meter training facility and are rotating managers and workers through the facility. Everyone’s training in this facility is done an expert system managers and by hands on experts who teach all required trades and they are also indoctrinated into the mind set and processes of “The Toyota Way”. Individuals must be knowledgeable to the point of training others at their home facility before

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