. Thus, Toyota adopted an offensive
strategy but also a defensive strategy.
The defensive strategy consists in favoring a policy of internationalization of the production. Major principles are that products, production centers and management must be adapted to the working local conditions. Furthermore, the local profits must be reinvested locally.
Nowadays, Toyota really focuses on understanding the consumer needs and his wants.
As an example, today, most of Toyota's plants are outside Japan. They implanted their manufactures where the demand was, in order to better to satisfy it and to reduce transportation costs. Moreover, transportation does not add any value that the customer is eager to pay for. Instead, the customer is willing to pay the product less, whereas, because of transportation, the price increases. This is a concrete example of Toyota's new management. Toyota can easily satisfy the demand because Toyota is where the demand is.
The offensive strategy consists in looking for a diversification in production. As an example, a branch of Toyota dashed into Research & Development and into electronic production (integrated circuits).
In the book 'Toyota Way' written by Jeffrey Liker, 14 management principles are identified. According to the author, those principles make Toyota the world's greatest manufacturer. 'Become a Learning Organization' is one of these principles. It's possible to summarize Toyota's learning organization in three key elements:Â
Identify root causes and develop countermeasures.
By asking the question why as many times as possible, Toyota determines the root cause of a problem.
Use Hansei: responsibility, self-reflection, and organizational learning.
Hansei is a concept that Toyota uses as a practical improvement tool like Kaizen: improvements are fed back into the organization and then disseminated.
Utilize policy deployment (Hoshin Kanri).
This method consists in fixing strategic goals, measuring today's success and planning the future: Toyota wants measurable and concrete objectives.
Toyota has well understood that the learning by the practice (learning by doing) allowed every car to be more effectively produced than the previous one. The learning by the practice is the increase of the knowledge bound to the exercise of the productive activity.
The continual evolution of the organization is justified for any complex process because the problems and the ideal solutions do not appear immediately at the stage of the conception of the process of production; it is also the consequence of the adaptation to the market.
Toyota's culture: the Toyota way
The Toyota Way describes the promoted values that comprises Toyota's culture and guides the daily decision making of its employees. It rests on 2 fundamental pillars:
- Challenge: seeing problems as challenges will help improving the global performance.
- Kaizen: continuous improvement which is embedded in the belief that employees should come to work each day with the goal of becoming better than the day before.
- Genchi Genbutsu: going to the source to find the factors that can help make the best decisions, build consensus and achieve goals. As an example, a solution is easily built around arguments based on
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