A Bumpy Road for Toyota

Just-in-time philosophy, focused on consistent grapheme improvement, propelled Toyota to become a leading global machine manufacturer. However, its global expansion and limited frame of experts relative to its global operations weakened this focus in North America.While Toyota remains a competitive elevator car manufacturer, it examined recurring periods of decline in its quality stand up. Now, it has to strengthen its JIT philosophy.Toyotas focus on quality is consistent with the just-in-time philosophy. JIT means eradicating or decreasing to the least possible level wastage in the production process. By doing so, the company can pursue a range of outcomes including decrease in inventory, cost reduction, error minimization, and mellowed quality. Quality is an outcome of implementing JIT while the focus on quality is a path to implementing JIT.Toyotas achievement of a high quality standing during its lead periods is a testament to the focus on quality as a possible means of i mplementing JIT (Bozarth and Handfield 547). It is also possible to implement JIT without a strong quality focus. Reducing inventory, minimizing cost and eradicating error could also be paths in implementing JIT. However, these paths including quality are interrelated and reinforcing so that the focus on other paths relieve call for the achievement of a certain level of quality especially in minimizing errors and reducing costs.The quality focus of Toyota worked because of its coordinators. These coordinators are mid-level managers in the manufacturing plants in Japan with decades of experience of the car companys JIT philosophy called Toyota Production System (TPS) (Bozarth and Handfield 546).These coordinators played a key role in promoting TPS to Toyotas employees because these oriented and trained the shop-floor managers and workers in the American manufacturing plant on ways of addressing actual issues emerging from the production line (547).This practical approach encouraged innovativeness and responsiveness to lower wastage. Coordinators are problematical to replicate because their deep knowledge emerged from decades of experience. Time to develop coordinators is a luxury given the current need of Toyota to expand and boost production to meet emergence demand.Hajime Oba differentiated Toyotas TPS with the JIT strategy of the three automobile manufacturers in Detroit. He claimed that the JIT approach in Detroit is superficial since the intention was only to reduce inventory without rattling getting into the essence of JIT (Bozarth and Handfield 547).There is some truth to this. American car manufacturers operate more through textbook theories of efficiency, which implies using the least possible input in maximizing output, and with formality or impersonal management highlighting distinctions in task assignments, processes and systems. This necessarily leads to a different JIT approach relative to the Japanese stance of JIT.The tenet haste makes wast e captures the situation in Toyotas Georgetown plant. In the 1990s, Toyota received recognition for high quality through automobile quality surveys (Bozarth and Handfield 547). with the work of its coordinators, the Georgetown plant even received recognition as the second best in terms of the quality of cars manufactured in the plant (547). This propelled gross revenue of Toyota cars in North America.The spike in demand pushed the plant to speed up production until it came to a point when quality suffered. With a limited number of coordinators for a large plant and language barriers, there was movement away from the TPS (547).In releasing the Camry, the company received many quality complaints from customers leading to the plummeting of its quality standing (548). Toyota is attempting to reassert the TPS in its Georgetown plant by recruiting a Japanese TPS expert to motivate middle managers to work the floor again.Toyotas quality focused TPS has worked and it still works. However, the automobile manufacturer needs to adjust implementation to consider its growth and expansion. Toyota needs to have sufficient coordinators and this time more American coordinators for the North American plant trained in its quality-based JIT philosophy.Work CitedBozarth, Cecil, and Robert Handfield. Introduction to Operations and Supply Chain Management. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice Hall, 2007.