Case Study: Toyota Company

Introduction

Companies should start transforming their culture with a belief of continuous improvement. The implementation of the continuous improvement plan should start from top. All the employees must be involved in the continuous improvement policy to make the process effective (Oliveira, Sá&Fernandes, 2017). This plan generally includes team building, lean values and problem solving. Mainly, the middle level managers of a company work for this conversion. The employees of the company Toyota produces around more than 1 million ideas for process improvement. The company implements almost 90 per cent of these ideas. There is a process which motivates and rewards the employees for implementing the continuous improvement plan. This case study focuses on the continuous improvement plan for the company Toyota.

Description of Continuous Improvement Plan

It is very important to include all the employees of Toyota Company in the process of continuous improvement(Wu, Feng& Jin, 2015). It is the responsibility of the leaders of Toyota Company to motivate and involve all the employees to make the plan a success. There are various strategies which can be used to assure that the team members of Toyota Company are motivated and supported to take part in the decision-making procedures, assume obligation and exercise initiative. These include:

  • Forming a committee
  • Offering choices
  • Suggestion box
  • Letting them select their training
  • Removing set working hours

It is very important to give information to the stakeholders about the different strategies and changes of the company. The stakeholders are important part of the company. There are various ways which helps to assure Toyota Company’s continuous improvement process is communicated to stakeholders which include:

  • Communicating the reason for which the process of improvement is required by the Toyota Company
  • Embeddingmessageexpertise in the implementation team
  • Driving employee rights of the resolution
  • Developing reference materials, train efficiently, and track proficiency
  • Ensuring leaders of the company about the decision

Discussion of The Sustainability Requirements

For any company, it is important to meet the requirements of sustainability to maintain the green culture. To ensure that Toyota Company meets the requirements of sustainability there are many ways which includes:

  • It is required to ensure thattheplan is clear andmetricsare lined up
  • Building leadership promise and engagement
  • Managingchanges
  • Providingjust-in-time practicaltraining
  • BuildingSupport

Mentoring, Coaching and Other Support Programs

There are various mentoring and coaching processes which can be utilized to assure that the employees and teams of Toyota Company are able to implement and support the organization’s continuous improvement process which includes:

  • Building are liable connection which is a most critical step for becoming a mentor
  • The mentors should recognize the strengths to assist the mentees reach their full potential
  • Earning the trust of the mentees
  • Identifying and fulfilling the goals

A knowledge management system of Toyota Company is a type of an IT system which stocks and retrieves information to increase teamwork, understanding and process placement. The knowledge management systems which are present in the Toyota Company provide assistance to keep the knowledge base for the employees and consumers(Cwikla, Gwiazda, Banas, Monica &Foit, 2018).In this way, it can be ensured that visions and experiences from business actions are seized and available through knowledge management systems.

For measuring the performance of the Toyota Company in an efficient manner, there is a need to create pointers which permit to identify the outcomes and informs about making the appropriate changes when it is essential. There are various areas of the company which have their own requirements, mechanisms and resources. There is a need to examine each area separately so ad to attain a particular objective. There are various strategies which can be developed to ensure that the systems and procedures are utilized to monitor the operational progress which includes:

  • Collectingapplicable data
  • Analyzing all gathered data
  • Engaging employees
  • Establishing communication stations and policies
  • Implementingnovelprocedures and workflows

Capture Insights, Experiences and Ideas for Improvements

There are various ways in which operations and planning of the Toyota Company could be improved which includes:

  • Utilizing a successive flow pattern in the procedure
  • Minimizing backtracking of work in the procedure
  • Implementinganexpectedprocedure
  • Reducing material movement
  • Emphasizing bottleneck management
  • Minimizing inventory
  • Creating an open environment
  • Maintaining flexibility

There are numerous ways in which it can be ensured that the strategiesof Toyota Company are communicated to the stakeholders according to organizational procedures which includes (Paraschivescu& COTÎRLEȚ, 2015):

  • Scheduling a meeting
  • Sending out a newsletter
  • Separating an online screen to screen meetings
  • Projecting a summary report
  • Scheduling a conference call
  • Keeping up lunch/dinner meetings

There are numerous ways in whichprocesses of the Toyota company are established which ensures that the team members are informed of outcomes of continuous improvement efforts which include:

  • Having the correctmethod to communicatethrough a plan
  • Recording and communicating meeting results
  • Inception meeting
  • Identifyingmain stakeholders and their drivers
  • Developing important communications
  • Considering the end story

There are various ways to record the work team performance of the employees of the Toyota Company to contribute in recognizing further opportunities for improvement which includes:

  • Tying the team's outcomes to the company's goals
  • Beginning with the team's consumers and the work procedures, the team monitors to satisfy their requirements
  • Measuring both individual and team performance
  • Shooting for verifiability.
  • Do not try to quantity all by numbers
  • Training the team to make its own evaluations

To identify further opportunities for improvement of the Toyota Company, the following is required:

  • Meetings
  • Determining the project scope
  • Conducting interviews with employees to collectresponses to particular queries
  • Developing benchmarking for numerous areas in the company
  • Preparing summary and thorough reports of the conclusions and including particular areas for primary improvement and possible solutions

To identify areas for further improvement when undertaking future planning for Toyota Company are:

  • Meetings
  • Determining theproject choices
  • Conducting survey
  • Preparing detailed reports of the results

Continuous improvement systems and procedures relate to other business organizations and necessities as it is designed to authorize employees to resolve difficulties and slowly progress the competence of their work procedures (Ito, 2016).

Conclusion

It can be concluded that the organizations should begin changing their way of life with a conviction of consistent improvement. The usage of the persistent improvement plan should begin from top. All the workers must be associated with the constant improvement strategy to make the procedure successful. This arrangement largely incorporates group building, lean qualities and critical thinking. For the most part, the center level administrators of an organization work for this change. This case study explains about various factors for the effective continuous improvement plan for Toyota Company.

Short Answer Questions

Ans 1: Continuous improvement is a process of improvements of services, products and procedures which are ongoing with the help of breakthrough and incremental techniques (Chadha, 2017). This will help to get improvements in small increments or breakthrough all at once. It helps to resolve the issues which have faults in them and slowly improve the effectiveness of the work.

Ans2:

1. Considering the presentation: It is essential to consider the presentation of the continuous improvement plan so the employees can easily understand it.

2. Considering the Terminology: It is required to focus on the use if terminologies while communicating.

3. Considering the Audience: There are different type of audience for whom different communicating strategies should be used.

Ans3: Sustainability practice can be affected by:·

Social impact: It deals with the community influence.

Focused business strategy: It deals with the company policies.

Economic viability: It deals with the financial status

Adaptability: It deals with the flexibility (Chadha, 2017)

Capacity to deliver: It deals with the ability to work

Ans4:The process of mentoring is a long run process which is based on the mutual respect and trust. In contrast to this, the process of coaching is for short period of time. Mentoring emphasizes more on forming links among the mentor and the mentee. Whereas, there is a structured and formal procedure for coaching.

Ans5: KM stands for knowledge management. The procedure of creation, sharing, utilizing and managing the information of a company is called as knowledge management. Knowledge management utilizes courses like library, information systems, management, information sciences, and business administration.

Stage 1: Collection

Stage 2: Organization

Stage 3: Summarization

Stage 4: Examination

Stage 5: Synthesizing

Stage 6: Decision Making

Ans6:The four key steps for monitoring operational progress are:
  • Stage 1: The first step is to design an effective plan for monitoring
  • Stage 2: design an efficient report management system
  • Stage 3: Recommendation for project development and improvement
  • Stage 4: The last step is to ensure the advices and recommendations should be followed accordingly (Chadha, 2017)
Ans7: The factors on which communication depends are:
  • Listening carefully: to communicate effectively the first step is to listen.
  • Communicating in complex circumstances: whenever difficulty arises there is a need to communicate
  • Verbal Communication: The communication which is done orally is verbal communication.
  • Nonverbal Communication: The communication which is done in a written manner is non-verbal communication.
  • Emotional Awareness: During communication the individuals must take care of each other’s emotional feelings.
Ans8:The criteria’s for internal audit are (Noraini, Zaini, Mustaffha&Norhanizah, 2018):
  • Business alignment
  • Stakeholder management
  • Service culture
  • Risk focus
  • Talent model
  • Technology
  • Cost optimization
  • Quality and innovation

Ans9: It is very important to work efficiently in a team. Two components for efficient team operation are:

A strong sense of reason: All the team members do not work for only money there must be a strong reason for team operation.

Measurable objectives: Every efficient team must have a particular roadmap for success.

Ans 10:To give the feedback following things are required:

Reminding about the reason for giving feedback

The prepared feedback should be to improve the circumstances or the employee's performance.

The feedback should not be in a critical, harsh or offensive language.

The best way to deliver a feedback should be positive and depended on improvement (Chadha, 2017).

References

Chadha, R. (2017). Value through continuous improvement. FAIMA Business & Management Journal5(1), 40.

Cwikla, G., Gwiazda, A., Banas, W., Monica, Z., &Foit, K. (2018). Assessment of the efficiency of the continuous improvement system based on Kaizen in an example company. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 400, No. 6, p. 062008). IOP Publishing.

Ito, H. (2016). The Toyota Way.In Quality Improvement in Behavioral Health (pp. 87-96).Springer, Cham.

Noraini, S., Zaini, J. A., Mustaffha, N., &Norhanizah, J. (2018).Internal Audit Effectiveness in Zakat Institutions from the Perspective of the Auditee. Management & Accounting Review17(3).

Oliveira, J., Sá, J. C., &Fernandes, A. (2017).Continuous improvement through" Lean Tools": An application in a mechanical company. Procedia Manufacturing13, 1082-1089.

Paraschivescu, A. O., & COTÎRLEȚ, P. C. (2015).Quality Continuous Improvement Strategies Kaizen Strategy--Comparative Analysis. Economy Transdisciplinarity Cognition18(1).

Wu, P., Feng, Y., & Jin, X. (2015). Why Continuous Improvement Program Fails—Lessons from the Toyota Production System. In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Advancement of Construction Management and Real Estate (pp. 893-904).Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Never forget to look up the online HTML CheatSheet when you forget how to write an image, a table or an iframe or any other tag in HTML!

Remember, at the center of any academic work, lies clarity and evidence. Should you need further assistance, do look up to our Management Assignment Help

Get It Done! Today

Applicable Time Zone is AEST [Sydney, NSW] (GMT+11)
Upload your assignment
  • 1,212,718Orders

  • 4.9/5Rating

  • 5,063Experts

Highlights

  • 21 Step Quality Check
  • 2000+ Ph.D Experts
  • Live Expert Sessions
  • Dedicated App
  • Earn while you Learn with us
  • Confidentiality Agreement
  • Money Back Guarantee
  • Customer Feedback

Just Pay for your Assignment

  • Turnitin Report

    $10.00
  • Proofreading and Editing

    $9.00Per Page
  • Consultation with Expert

    $35.00Per Hour
  • Live Session 1-on-1

    $40.00Per 30 min.
  • Quality Check

    $25.00
  • Total

    Free
  • Let's Start

Browse across 1 Million Assignment Samples for Free

Explore MASS
Order Now

My Assignment Services- Whatsapp Tap to ChatGet instant assignment help

refresh