Toyota´s Philosophy has always been: customer first and Quality first ever since its founding. It is known as the guru of Total Quality Management based on the unchanging principles.
To enhance the quality of life of people everywhere to eventually provide products and services to meet the customers needs worldwide the corporate highly engages itself in Research and Development to accurately identify the needs and provide high quality, low costs products. As shown in the following graph, the company invests time and huge sum of money to find out what exactly their market needs
Money spent in R & D
The company goes further to improve quality of product and work quality by listening to the customer as well. According to the companys web page, the entire organisation strives to ensure enhanced satisfaction by delivering the voice of the customer to the relevant departments and utilizing it to improve quality
Customer´s Voice
Despite all this well skilled steps to follow. How did Toyota engineered its downfall? why wasnt it able to replicate its DNA, what damaged its brand significantly?
In 2008 the company doubled it sales, apparently this turned out to be a nightmare instead of a victory for the firm because they had to hire many new employees and suppliers which eventually led to a production system failure because it wasn’t able to scale up and provide adequate training to the many new employees and suppliers that were added( I strongly doubt if the price and quality would be thesame if the entire managment process was overturned here). The company´s DNA was unable to replicate
Secondly, The Toyotas quality image got damaged when they started having problems with brake systems and runaway vehicles. Some think if the senior managers had dealt openly with their problems upfront would have saved Toyota substantial monies and lessed public outrage(Are we still talking about the customer is first here?)
