Toyota

The Entrepreneur

Kiichiro Toyoda

A Japanese entrepreneur and the son of Toyoda Loom Works founder Sakichi Toyoda. His decision to take Toyoda Loom Works into automobile manufacturing would create what would eventually become Toyota Motor Corporation, the world's largest automobile manufacturer.

Akio Toyoda - current CEO of Toyota Motor Corporation

Akio Toyoda joined Toyota in 1984. Then joined the board of directors in 2000. In 2005, he was promoted to executive vice president and in 2009 he was announced as the president of the company. 

 

Brief introduction of how the business started

In 1936, Toyota entered the passenger car market with its Model AA and held a competition to establish a new logo emphasizing speed for its new product line. After receiving 27,000 entries, one was selected that additionally resulted in a change of its moniker to "Toyota" from the family name "Toyoda." It was believed that the new name sounded better and its eight-stroke count in the Japanese language was associated with wealth and good fortune. The original logo no longer is found on its vehicles but remains the corporate emblem used in Japan.


Still, there were no guidelines for the use of the brand name, "TOYOTA", which was used throughout most of the world, which led to inconsistencies in its worldwide marketing campaigns.


To remedy this, Toyota introduced a new worldwide logo in October 1989 to commemorate the 50th year of the company, and to differentiate it from the newly released luxury Lexus brand. The logo made its debut on the 1989 Toyota Celsior and quickly gained worldwide recognition. There are three ovals in the new logo that combine to form the letter "T", which stands for Toyota. The overlapping of the two perpendicular ovals inside the larger oval represent the mutually beneficial relationship and trust that is placed between the customer and the company while the larger oval that surrounds both of these inner ovals represent the "global expansion of Toyota's technology and unlimited potential for the future."


The logo started appearing on all printed material, advertisements, dealer signage, and the vehicles themselves in 1990.


Toyota Products

Toyota Logo

Toyota headquarters in Tokyo City

Toyoda Standard Sedan AA

Lexus LS

Camry

Estima

Prius - hybrid technology

Corolla Altis

Hilux

Lexus RX (Harrier)

Vios

Yaris

Key Factors contributing to the success of the business

Toyota is clearly a dominate leader in automobile manufacturing today. There are 14 principles are listed and compared with some of the strategies that United States automakers have employed, it becomes clear why Toyota has succeeded as it has. The 14 principles are known as the "Toyota Way" and are listed below:


1. Base your management decisions on long term philosophies, even at the expense of short term goals
2. Create continuous process flow to bring problems to the surface
3. Use pull systems to avoid over production
4. Level out the workload
5. Build in a method to stop and fix problems when they are discovered, this ensures quality the first time
6. Standardized tasks provide the foundation for continuous improvement and employee empowerment
7. Use visual control so no problems are hidden
8. Use only reliable, thoroughly tested technology that serves you people and processes
9. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy and can and do teach it to others
10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company's philosophy
11. Respect your extended network of partners and suppliers by challenging them and helping them improve
12. Go and see for yourself so that you completely understand the situation
13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly consider all options; implement decisions rapidly
14. Become a learning organization through relentless self examination and continuous improvement.

The ups & downs of the entrepreneur & their business.

In 2005, Toyota produced one vehicle approximately every four seconds somewhere in the world, while at the same time, setting the benchmark for product quality. Toyota perennially wins national and international acclaim in all of the major automobile quality ratings. For instance, Toyota’s flagship LEXUS nameplate has earned the top spot in JD Power’s Initial Quality Survey for over 10 years running. On top of all this, Toyota is profitable; in fact, very profitable. Toyota set record profits 2003, 2004, and 2005 earning over $10 billion annually even while their North American competitors saw significant drops in earnings and losses.


But other companies have also been successful. What makes Toyota intriguing is that its success has been sustained over an extremely long time period by most business standards. From the ashes of World War II, Toyota initially struggled to maintain solvency, but rose over the following decades to become Japan’s leading manufacturer. As it grew, Toyota began seeking markets outside of Japan, and by the early 1980’s Toyota was well established in the US market, Toyota has grown each year for the last 50 years, and has not experienced a loss in net earnings since the early 1950’s. This is standout performance in an industry characterized by cyclical ups and downs.


Toyota is also intriguing because its business and management philosophy is unique, its approach to manufacturing exceptional and counterintuitive, its collective understanding of operational dynamics breathtakingly insightful. Toyota is perhaps most well-known for its production system, first documented in a detailed 80-page handbook published internally in Japanese in 1973. The first English publication on it appeared in 1977 by Sugimori, et al., as a high level summary. However, it wasn’t until the early 1990’s that the uniqueness of Toyota’s system became well-known with the publication of the book The Machine that Changed the World. In it, the MIT professors detail the strikingly robust, flexible, and efficient systems they observed in Japan, and dubbed it “lean manufacturing” for their ability to design, produce, and deliver higher quality products in volume with a fraction of the resources of their North American and European competitors. The manufacturing community learned later that the model of lean manufacturing was the Toyota Production System (TPS).


Toyota has been remarkably open in sharing its system with others, even establishing the Toyota Supplier Support Center to provide consulting assistance to US companies wanting to operate more efficiently, at no cost to the client. More recently, we’ve come to understand that Toyota’s uniqueness extends into many other areas as well, including product development and logistics. Cottage industries are sprouting in many arenas to provide assistance and training in lean tools and concepts, and putting them into practice. Lean applications that were once targeted primarily at high-volume manufacturing plants are rapidly finding their way into other sectors of the economy, including engineering, financial services, transportation and logistics, healthcare, food and beverage services, and government (including military operations). Toyota’s impact is being felt well beyond the automotive industry.