TOYOTA

Product Development - Toyota

Product Development - Toyota

Outline

This research focuses on the various aspects of Product Development of Toyota and comprises of the following chapters:

Introduction

Literature Review

Proposed Methodology

Rationale

This study highlights many issues related to Product Development of Toyota and gives a broad analysis of Toyota markets vehicles. Toyota is Japan's biggest car company and the second largest in the world after General Motors. It produces around eight million vehicles per year, about a million fewer than the number produced by General Motors. Toyota markets vehicles in over 160 countries. The company dominates the market in Japan, with about 45% of all new cars registered in 2004 being Toyotas. Toyota also has entered in the European and North American market . It has significant market shares in several fast-growing south-east Asian countries (Basu, 1999).

Toyota has factories all over the world, manufacturing or assembling vehicles for local markets, including its most popular model, the Corolla. Toyota has manufacturing or assembly plants in the United States, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Poland, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and more recently India and Argentina. Toyota New Zealand assembled vehicles until 1998, when it switched to importing cars from Japan and Australia. Cars from these plants are often exported to other countries. For example, the South African-built Toyota Corolla is exported to Australia, while the Australian-built Camry is exported (in left hand drive) to countries in the Middle East. Between 1997 and 2000, the number one selling car in the U.S. was the Toyota Camry. It was dethroned in 2001 by the Honda Accord, only to regain its place in 2002, with the introduction of a redesigned model.

Expansion of the Japanese Automobile Industry

Japan's automobile export was the centre of trade resistance with the US and the European Community in the 1980s. That was partially because Japanese manufacturers endeavoured to decrease the confrontation that they started localized production. Foreign direct buying into to facilitate the localized output had other virtues as well: for the Japanese manufacturers it endowed them to bypass the risk of exchange rate fluctuation and to reply more exactly to the desires of localized markets. For the owner district of the buying into, it intended not only the creation of job, but furthermore eventual move of certain technologies by sub-contracting that increased the productivity of the localized companies (Michael, 1983).

In supplement to overseas output, which is part of the answer to market globalization by the Japanese automobile part, the output system they taken up furthermore has a important significance to the globalization of the industry. That is, Japanese manufacturers directed exodus from Fordism mass output system to post-Fordism in alignment to reply to more variable and flexible claims, which presented organisational innovations. One way to articulate such post-Fordism is the thin output system, which started to restore the Fordism mass-production system even in the United States.

Lean output , as asserted by Womack, Jones and Roos, is not the only characteristic of Japanese commerce, but they present it as a assembly of universal concepts applicable ...