Toyota Motor Company: Losing its Quality Edge?

Over the years, the Japanese automaker Toyota had built up a reputation for manufacturing reliable cars and trucks. Toyota's products were a byword for quality for customers so much so that its manufacturing techniques were followed by its competitors world over. At Toyota, quality was built into each manufacturing process and employees from all divisions ensured that defective items did not pass on to the next process. At the core of the company's success was the Toyota Production System (TPS), which made use of concepts like genchi genbutsu, Just-in-Time (JIT), Kaizen, Kanban, and Jidoka to reach a high level of efficiency in production. To overcome quality assurance problems caused due to rapid globalization, Toyota adopted the “Toyota Way” — a set of management principles and communicated them to all its overseas manufacturing plants. Due to its efficiency in manufacturing, Toyota became one of the most trusted brands in the global automobile industry. But some analysts felt that Toyota had become a victim of its own success.