Toyota Canada: Automotive Company, Organizational Structure, Products, And Challenges

About Toyota Canada

Discuss about the Toyota Canada Supply Chain Risk Management.

Toyota Canada is an automotive company that was founded in the year 1964. Its headquarters is in Toronto, Ontari.It mainly serves in the areas of Canada. The company operates two vehicle manufacturing facilities, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc. (TMMK) and Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. (TMMC)(Jacobs 2015).Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada Inc. (TMMC) dealing with manufacture of North American market vehicles, Toyota and Lexus.  The Lexus RX 350 and Lexus RX 450h hybrid and Toyota Corolla are manufactured at TMMC’s south and north plants in Cambridge, Ontario. TMMC’s Woodstock manufactures RAV4 in Ontario which was opened in 2007. While Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, Inc. (TMMK) is an automobile manufacturing facility operating in Georgetown, Kentucky, USA. It operates in areas of North America (TEMA) owned by Toyota Motor Corporation of Japan. The brand offers services such as vehicle leasing, vehicle service, and automotive finance. Toyota Canada has employed over 24,000 all Toyota companies and dealers. Toyota Company is owned by Toyota Motor Corporation.

The products associated with the Toyota Canada are in a wide variety such as materials handling equipment, automobiles (car air-conditioning compressors, vehicles, engines, and car electronics) and textile machinery(Nagasawa, Ed. 2012).

Toyota organizational structure is divisional which make it more effective evident on its global success over the years. The structure underwent some changes in 2013 to correct some product recalls due to safety issues raised by the investigators in 2010(Kingsnorth, 2011).

Past organization structure was a strong centralized global hierarchy. The company headquarters was in Japan and was responsible for all the decisions. The structure was greatly criticized of slow response to safety issues and amended in 2013 as follows(McLelland. 2016).

The company maintains its global hierarchy even after the changes were made in 2013. The decision making power currently has been given to regional heads and business unit head as opposed to times before 2013. The decision-making process is never centralized anymore even though all business units are required to report to the global headquarters in Japan.

There are eight regional divisions in Toyota’s organizational structure, namely; Japan, North America, East Asia and Oceania, Asia Middle East, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, China, and Africa. All regional heads are supposed to reports directly to the company’s headquarters. These regional divisions help Toyota company improve its products and services with the needs arising from each regional market-specific needs.

Toyota's Manufacturing Facilities and Products

Toyota organizational structure also has the set of product based divisions. They are four and they include; a. Unit Center, which is responsible for engine, transmission and other related operations, b. Toyota No. 1 for operations in North America, Europe, and Japan, c. Lexus International and d. Toyota No. 2 for operations in all other regions(Kingsnorth, 2011). This characterization of Toyota organizational structure helps in supporting the development of brands and product lines.

The enterprise risk management team is comprised of from the top Board of Directors, followed by Corporate Governance Meetings Organized by the Risk Management Chairman; Global CRO executive vice president Shigeki Terashi(Toyota&Namerikawa 2017, September).

The regional heads in equal positions, company risk managers in participation as well as the presidents, chief officers, Respective Groups (functional), respective company and all the regional CROs. All of these groups of people collaborate to manage risks in a different capacity to improve the services of the Toyota Company across the globe(Herbert et al., 2012).

This new structure helps the company to be more vigilant in responding to regional market conditions hence they are able to meet their needs.

There is flexibility in speeding responses to issues and the provision of high-quality products in the global market by the Toyota Company.

Toyota Company is experiencing continued growth as this organizational structure is able to facilitate business resiliently (Chari, John, & Murphy 2010).

However, increased regional heads decision-making power has reduced powers of global headquarters control over the global organization.

• The biggest challenges with Toyota Canada are associated with Economic slowdown and recession which affects the company’s sales in all areas of manufacturing. This impact is felt by the company in the international market(Cameron& Watson 2010).
• The economic slowdown is making consumers try to save almost every coin restricting them from buying any car.
• Recalling of close to 9 million Toyota Company and other automobiles caused by challenges of unintended acceleration. vehicles its sports utility vehicles and pickup trucks caused by problems reported in the front suspension systems. This led to spending billions of of money by Toyota company raising a need to do a rhorough test of their automobiles since it is a matter of safety of their customers buying their products(Cameron& Watson 2010).
• Huge penalties due to practices of non-safety measures raising a need to be very cautious when manufacturing, testing and releasing their products in the market(Comeau, Dalmotas& German 2011, May).
• There is tremendous competition faced by the Company which continues to increase every day as a result of new entrants of companies dealing with the manufacturing of automobiles into the market from other countries in world. This calls for Toyota to come up with new products and improve their product quality further to retain their position. This requires a need to adopt new plans and strategies to retain market leadership(Chari, John, & Murphy 2010).

Challenges facing managers in the process of implementing or using ERM with SCRM

• The company managers are faced with a struggle to ease the recall and repair process by offering a free at-home recalled pick-ups vehicles and alternative transportation for the owners, while they try to fix the problems(Essays, UK. November 2013).
• They have the greatest challenge of restoring their reputation to consumers who feel that the company takes too long to fix problems related to safety issues and sometimes even ready to mislead investigators not to notice them(Kingsnorth, 2011).
• The other challenge is trying to come up with new ways that will convince the consumer that their products are now safe and increase their sales to return to normal.
• The management is to make sure that in future such blows are rectified before the public notices(Essays, UK. November 2013).
• Toyota executives have been failing to prioritize planning for comprehensive, automated and exceptional based risks in assumption blinded by recent company massive growth(Yokoyama 2009, September).

• There is a need to transform system low-end user computing platform by migrating from a heterogeneous operating system environment with the consolidation of Windows 7 (Heymans, Walker, Young & Fowler, 2014).
• Rising service desk calls and low-end system user due to the poor manageability of new environmental
• Lack of modernized and improved end-user experience lacking support for greater employees’ productivity.
• Poor integration with existing infrastructure and application making the system unstable.
• The high cost of ownership due to the high overall cost of service.
• The Toyota vehicles owners continued the experience of sudden acceleration problems in some cases even after the said fixation of recalled vehicles has been made end users feel more troubled in their own problems(Fergusson, 2011).
• There is mixed consumer opinion according to polls conducted on the safety of Toyota brands. The polls reported that 31% of USA consumers of Toyota products were feeling unsafe, 35% did not have confidence in the brand with 7% with no intention of ever buying Toyota products. There is 55% of consumers who feel that the company response to safety issues is too slow and that could endanger future of Toyota brands(Comeau, Dalmotas& German 2011, May).
• There is difficulty in managing a global supply chain as Toyota executives fail to prioritize ways of planning risk management by assuming calls from the employees’ to make changes in the quality (Heymans, Walker, Young & Fowler, 2014).

Conclusion

Toyota Corporation is one of the leading companies in the automobile manufacturing industry. The company has dealt with many challenges over the past years more so restoring its reputation tied to the 2010 mess. This mess resulted in the recalling of close to 9 million manufactured automobile vehicles from the market and was greatly felt by the powerful company. The company in response to what it believes (customer centrism), TMC spent millions to fix reported issues in the vehicles that were already been bought bought by the consumers and gave required fast information to the concerned customers. Toyota automobiles also were able to determine the origin of the mess, and dedicated itself to analyzing it deeply in making sure it retains its position in the global market. What the company ought to do is implement a more strict internal quality products test on all of its vehicles and products to help with detection of any technical errors during manufacturing before they are released to the market. By so doing the company will save millions of money which would otherwise be used to correct recalls and detection problems. Lastly and not the least, Toyota motor corporation will be able to retain its position in the automobile industry at all times.

References

Cameron, L., & Watson, T. (2010).The truth about Toyota.Canadian business, 83(6), 28-31.

Campbell, B. A., Jhamb, A., Maguire, J. A., Toyota, B., & Ma, R. (2009).Meningiomas in 2009: controversies and future challenges. American journal of clinical oncology, 32(1), 73-85.

Chari, R. S., John, H., & Murphy, G. (2010).Regulating lobbying: a global comparison.Manchester University Press.

Comeau, J. L., Dalmotas, D. J., & German, A. (2011, May).Event data recorders in Toyota vehicles.In Proceedings of the 21st Canadian Multidisciplinary Road Safety Conference, Halifax, Nova Scotia (Vol. 17).

Essays, UK. (November 2013). Factors influencing the business environment of Toyota. Retrieved from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/marketing/factors-influencing-the-business-environment-of-toyota-marketing-essay.php?vref=1

Fergusson, I. F. (2011). United States-Canada trade and economic relationship: prospects and challenges. Canadian Imports and Trade Issues.

Herbert, C., Moiseenko, V., McKenzie, M., Redekop, G., Hsu, F., Gete, E., ...& Lee, A. (2012). Factors predictive of symptomatic radiation injury after linear accelerator-based stereotactic radiosurgery for intracerebral arteriovenous malformations. International Journal of Radiation Oncology• Biology• Physics, 83(3), 872-877.

Heymans, C., Walker, S. B., Young, S. B., & Fowler, M. (2014).Economic analysis of second use electric vehicle batteries for residential energy storage and load-leveling. Energy Policy, 71, 22-30.

Jacobs, A. J. (2015). The New Domestic Automakers in the United States and Canada: History, Impacts, and Prospects. Lexington Books.

Kingsnorth, D. J. (2011).Meeting the challenges of supply this decade.Environmental and Energy Study Institute.

McLelland, M. (Ed.). (2016). The end of Cool Japan: Ethical, legal, and cultural challenges to Japanese popular culture. Routledge.

Nagasawa, M. (Ed.). (2012). Molecular conformation and dynamics of macromolecules in condensed systems: a collection of contributions based on lectures presented at the 1st Toyota Conference, Inuyama City, Japan, 28 September-1 October 1987. Elsevier.

Toyota, R., &Namerikawa, T. (2017, September).Formation control of multi-agent system considering obstacle avoidance. In Society of Instrument and Control Engineers of Japan (SICE), 2017 56th Annual Conference of the (pp. 446-451). IEEE.

Yokoyama, T. (2009, September). Progress and challenges for Toyota’s fuel cell vehicle development. In California Air Resources Board ZEV Symposium, Sacramento CA. Sept (Vol. 21).