Toyota

by Chelsea Lange, Research Intern for GLOBAL ID LLC

Recently Toyota has had some mechanical problems with their vehicles. Toyota“got carried away chasing high-speed growth, market share, and productivity gains year in and year out. All that slowly dulled the commitment to quality embedded in Toyota's corporate culture.” The problems began back in 1995 when Okuda took over the company. Bad decision-making and lack of execution began the downfall of Toyota. In 2003, the company began CCC21 ("Construction of Cost Competitiveness for the 21st Century"). Toyota began to focus on low cost. This caused the company to sacrifice quality for low price. Later came the aggressive version of CCC21, “dubbed Value Innovation, which promised more savings by making the entire development process cheaper and faster, further trimming parts, production costs, and time to market.” This Value Innovation led to an even greater decrease in quality. Earlier this year Toyota faced the sudden-acceleration problem in their vehicles as well as some other issues. Currently Toyota is offering incentives such as no-interest loans and discounted leases to try to win back customers. It takes a long time for companies to build up a good reputation and only a few problems to ruin it.

Source:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_12/b4171032583967_page_2.htm