Toyota's Approach Research Articles

How Toyota's approach towards marketing communications helps keep everything going right

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The Employee Suggestion System: A New Approach Using Latent Semantic Analysis

AbstractEmployee suggestion systems are often used as a way to improve participation from members of the organization to help solve problems that cannot be solved through traditional organizational practices. In the government sector, employee involvement programs are the most difficult to implement mainly because management regularly changes with new administration and these changes bring about many short‐term management practices and systems. Toyota's approach to employee suggestion programs has been widely benchmarked and studied, yet there is little research to show that these practices can be applied or are successful in the public sector. This work uses a statistical data‐mining technique to compare which types of human resource management practices are prevalent in employee suggestion programs at Toyota and a target government organization. This work shows that Toyota emphasizes organization‐centered factors to stimulate employee participation in solving small problems that relate to an employee's job. On the contrary, government organizations tend to emphasize employee factors that make conditions right for employees to make larger improvements in their jobs that lead to improvements outside their work areas. Findings suggest that Toyota's approach to employee suggestion programs is not a way to weaken management's obligation to perform problem solving, but instead is another medium to highlight problems that do not require management's intervention. These new insights and others provide an increased understanding of employee suggestion programs in the public sector that are unique to manufacturing. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

A quantitative investigation of Toyota's approach in teaching standardised work

Many companies strive to utilise Toyota's standardised work (SW) methodology in attempt to make improvements by stabilising existing operations. Unfortunately, most companies who implement SW fail to understand how it is developed to encourage a specific balance between kaizen and standardisation. In turn, most outsiders perceive Toyota to emphasise kaizen over standardisation which causes many of the unique features and characteristics of SW to be improperly understood. This work utilises latent semantic analysis as a new technique to study Toyota's approach in teaching and developing SW. The findings of this work show that Toyota relies on the principles of the Toyota production system to help teach the achievement of SW. Results also show that Toyota emphasises a number of prerequisites to achieve kaizen to make work more consistent and predictable before improving SW. Other findings show the essential features of SW are strongly related to work analysis and the achievement of quality rather than productivity. The benefits of this work is to improve the way SW is designed and developed to better understand how it is achieved in a lean system.

Entrepreneurial applications of the lean approach to service industries

Service industries have grown significantly in recent years, especially in the advanced economies. The applicability of the Toyota system for manufacturing excellence to other industries has been widely studied. This paper seeks to contribute to this growing body of research by exploring the applications of the Toyota approach, particularly the lean system in the service sector. The paper examines the information systems that have enabled benefit in the service industries, to include vendor-managed inventory systems and variants, and then compares the benefits from information systems in support of supply chains. We also review why enterprise systems provide more opportunities in aiding the implementation of the lean systems. We present a case study of a South Korean supply chain system to demonstrate the entrepreneurial application of such approaches.

The New Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing

This article deals with the Toyota Production System that has been applied to integrated chip making. Even more important, Toyota's approach to mass production has produced bountiful profits. These early results point to the new economics of semiconductor manufacturing and that this will have a profound and lasting effect on the industry and create new opportunities for growth.

Beyond theory: An examination of lean new product introduction practices in the UK

Interest is growing around the application of lean techniques to new product introduction (NPI). Although a relatively emergent topic compared with the application of ‘lean’ within the factory, since 2000 there has been an exponential rise in the literature on this subject. However, much of this work focuses on describing and extolling the virtues of the ‘Toyota approach’ to design. Therefore, by way of a stock take for the UK, the present authors' research has set out to understand how well lean product design practices have been adopted by leading manufacturers. This has been achieved by carrying out in-depth case studies with three carefully selected manufacturers of complex engineered products. This paper describes these studies, the detailed results and subsequent findings, and concludes that both the awareness and adoption of practices is generally embryonic and far removed from the theory advocated in the literature.

Cutting-edge Discussions of Management, Policy, and Program Issues in Emergency Care

Cutting-edge Discussions of Management, Policy, and Program Issues in Emergency Care

Innovating in intelligent automobile transportation: towards an industry-wide consortium?

The paper deals with the prospects for innovation in intelligent transportation and automated highway systems within the automotive industry. It is based on a specific model of innovation and applies such a model to the Japanese automotive industry, and Toyota's approach in particular, as an in-depth case study. The paper proposes that a step-by-step innovation strategy is more efficient than a breakthrough policy and is the only alternative for successful innovation.

Toyota's approach to alternative technology vehicles: The power of diversification strategies

Abstract While the “quality revolution” of the 80's and the “oil crisis” of the 70's dramatically altered the automotive industry, a new and potentially more influential issue is emerging—the pursuit of an environmentally friendly vehicle. This “green car,” or “eco car,” has become the new “holy grail” of automotive achievement and has the world's largest automakers racing to find a solution that satisfies environmental regulations, rapidly expanding new markets, and consumer preferences alike. Toyota Motor Corporation has chosen to follow several paths simultaneously to attain this seemingly elusive goal. Their twin-tiered technological approach focuses on improving the traditional interval combustion engine (ICES) and developing alternative powertrain technologies, including electric vehicles (EVs), fuel cells and hybrids (a combination of the ICE and EV). Toyota's strategy is to establish proficiency, but not dominance, in a number of the possible alternatives to the current automobile. Toyota strategists believe this is the best tactic for dealing with the uncertainty and risk prevalent in the search for the “green car”.