Change Element in Toyota Companys Accomplishment - Case Study Example

Change is one of the most important things that should happen in an organisation that tries to compete and wants to be a cut above the other. An organisation that wants to create a competitive advantage has no other option but to go for change. Change is the most important element in an organisation’s accomplishment. However, change in most of the time requires fundamental turning point in order to make a difference and head to triumph. Change should require new approaches. In business, this even calls for at least one. Total quality management (TQM) and business process re-engineering (BPR) are two of the most common modern business approaches at present. These approaches evidently require some changes in order to finally establish a relevant achievement rate on the part of an organisation. However, in implementing them, there are difficulties that organisations have had in the past when trying to implement new approaches to performance improvement in business management operations. The work at hand tries to provide TQM and BPR as common examples of modern business approaches which have had high failure rates with the discussion why this took place and its probable impact on the attempts of companies to become lean. In reality, organisations are very able to make changes in the way they operate or when they introduce new systems. This is evident in the idea that every organisation has relevant management system that they follow or initiate. In fact, in the presence of tough competition, organisations have felt the necessity to do the right thing, in order for them to establish a market share and remain in the competition. Doing the right thing, in modern time means embracing change. This allows the organisation to do what is essential. In fact, there are various organisations at present that try to implement new business approaches such as TQM and BPR. However, in implementing these, it is also evident that organisations face remarkable difficulties too. These difficulties in general are in line with how the organisations operate, how they will implement the actual new approaches or changes and how they will evaluate and initiate the necessary corrective measures or control. These are some of the most important issues that the work at hand specifically emphasises. In the first place, some difficulties when organisations need to change the way they operate include finding the right actual approach on how the human resource should respond to change. For instance, changing the basic outlook and orientation of the employees and top management is one of the tough challenges involved in the implementation of TQM (Mukherjee, 2006, p.370). There are varying TQM activities and this business approach has also basic philosophy necessary to be employed in the organisation. It happened that the human resource challenges are linked to TQM implementation, highlighting the role of HRD professionals and internal consultants, which eventually would allow great consideration on how to transfer learning to behaviour. However, aside from the human resource strategies, Deming argued that there are other important considerations to be taken into account for an organisation to successfully implement TQM, which primarily include adopting a new philosophy, improving the system of production and service, instituting training on the job and leadership, driving out fear and breaking down barriers between departments (Johnson, 2011, p.96). Adopting a new philosophy alone is a difficult task to be implemented in an organisation, because not every employee will have to finally realize what the organisation would want to implement. The improvement of the system of production and service for instance, requires a high standard of audit and control, primarily among experts with substantial know-how on what best ideas to implement, but this must have to be confined within the area of best practices. In addition, establishing leadership is another difficult task to initiate if an organisation would want to implement change. Not everyone has the potential to become a leader, but this might be developed or even exercised, but it must require mastery. In addition, in leadership, it might be easy to develop members, but it is hard to create true followers. Organisations truly face difficulties when implementing change. For instance, the failure to provide the right organisational machinery for addressing the key strategic issues in an organisation is one of the considered factors leading to the ineffective employment of TQM (Pike, Barnes and Barnes, 1995, p.66). On the other hand, the BPR is known to deliver strategic advantage on the part of an organisation, but this will last only for a while when the same effort will be initiated by the major competitors, but around 70 percent of BPR initiatives fail to achieve the desired goals (Khosrowpour, 2000, p.228). There are some major challenges linked to the success of BPR implementation. The TQM is a management approach to long-term success through customer satisfaction. In a TQM effort, all members of an organization participate in improving processes, products, services, and the culture in which they work. Aside from TQM, the BPR is also a management strategy in business that is implemented in order to improve the organisation’s service to customers, cut its operational costs and make it a cut above the other in the world of competition. The BPR primarily focuses on the analysis and design of organisation’s workflows and business processes. In other words, TQM and BPR are approaches that would require vital technical efforts on the part of the management. They all literally would want to employ the appropriate change in an organisation. All of them would have to call for the effective and dynamic participation of the top management and professionals and down to the immediate front liners or technically the human resources that have to put the whole plan in action disregarding the presence of challenges. In fact, all these mentioned challenges found in the business and environment are important forces that influence effective implementation of TQM, and these call for the top management and professionals to become effective key players of change in the transformation process. In fact, successful BPR implementation is linked to careful planning and strong leadership, making people management as the central consideration (Khosrowpour, 2000, p.228). Strong leadership alone, as already stated is a great challenge that needs to be addressed by the management. This clearly elaborates the fact that organisations need to do things to achieve successful implementation of change. This can be evidently done through operation, training and culture change. Today, internal cost reduction and efficiency improvement are considered beneficial for the customers and the entire competition, which at the bottom line means that the reduction of cost in the operation is primarily aimed at improving competitiveness and market responsiveness (Mohapatra and Singh, 2012, p.31). The reduction of cost is caused by engaging in a remarkable operation that eventually will benefit both customers and the entire management. Therefore, in dealing with matters concerning the operation especially in the event of change, the organisation should have to clearly emphasise the essence of competitiveness and market responsiveness. On the other hand, a remarkable study in line with the factors relevant to the success of TQM implementation reveals that the realisation of TQM’s success may depend on the time since its adoption, the involvement of quality objectives in the actual strategic planning process and the necessity of senior managers to take charge and ensure that the majority of the employees are taking part of the actual implementation process of TQM (Taylor and Wright, 2003, p.97). This therefore means that the top level managers should be able to ensure the important success factors such as goals and objectives, benefits and impact of the project on the company performance prior to engaging in BPR (Guimaraes, 1999, p.53). In today’s age of tough competition and advancing concepts about an organisation, the management functions have become sophisticated allowing experts and specialists to do the trick and the management will only have to strongly rely on them. However, most of the common practice reveals that the management is bureaucratic. This allows various employees or the human resource in general to have their activities enclosed to activities of small functions only. This without question has become the fundamental source as to knowing the essential actions that organisations wanting for change should consider in the operation, training and culture. For instance, prior to the success of IBM, the mindset of operation managers needed some changes, especially in the implementation of BPR, because this is one of the common reasons of failure to implement successful re-engineering that in reality is affected by the current culture’s acceptance to change, employees’ skills, the level of training and the control of stress level on individuals’ affected by change (Schrage, 1997). With relevant emphasis on the culture change, organisations should be able to create a remarkable culture that would truly work together for the achievement of the ultimate goal for change. In fact, as already stated based on some of the examples, it is clear that the human resource is the primary force that will ensure either the achievement or failure of change. The organisation should require that the entire consideration of the organisation is in line with the achievement of change, but this can be impossible to set up if the human resource in general is not willing to go for change. In fact, it is clear that, as already stated, only a few of organisations succeed when employing either TQM or BPR because the organisation has no substantial ideas as to how to make these business approaches to become dynamic in the human resource. As a result, failure to implement the right culture in an organisation will always result to some possible varied reactions from the human resource. This will always be the primary scenario when change is introduced into the system. It is a remarkable point that could explain the associated failure of TQM and BPR in an organisation. It is therefore clear that learning is essential when an organisation tries to implement new business approaches such as TQM and BPR, because these two might be something new in an organisation that would try to create a remarkable impact on the operation, training and culture. There are remarkable organisations that truly have acquired the rightful formula in implementing new business approaches in the age of advancing competition. One of these companies cited commonly because of its successful implementation of TQM is the Toyota Company. At Toyota, the success is the result of learning cycles across the human resource, because the big ideas formulated by experts will need to be checked if they are totally in line with the best practices of the organisation. There is a prevailing balancing and checking between the good ideas and lean innovations in short. Notice that as already mentioned, in most cases, experts and professionals are the ones having the essential voice in the entire operation, because they all have the ideas. However, in reality, not all of these better ideas are linked to the best practices of an organisation. This means that the implementation of better ideas would have to require the need for audit in order to ensure that everything fits in to the actual design of the organisation to go for change. At Toyota, it is evident that there are various experts involved in the actual business operation, but the successful implementation of TQM and BPR in this company lies on the point that it does not stop alone at the level of professionals and experts, but across the entire company, as it encourages the fundamental culture for learning. This eventually includes learning things in the midst of failures, which must be the most important point of learning. An organisation that fails to consider this, while trying to establish change cannot truly upgrade its level which is a necessity prior to the success of implementing new business approaches. Therefore, just like in the case of Toyota, the culture for learning cycle is necessary and an evident requirement prior to the success of implementing new business approaches that would require the need to go for change. As reported, lean operations are more than new processes, because they would require a new culture of learning, which make it totally harder for various organisations in the actual scenario, which eventually leads to only 2 percent of companies with lean programs to obtain their target goals or results in the end (Denning, 2011). As implied based on the illustration earlier, Toyota is known for its ability to implement lean programs successfully. In the case of Toyota, lean is a pivotal turning point to provide more value for its target customers. The reason of Toyota’s success in the lean programs is its ability to examine the human systems that allows it to instill its vital principles of trust, mutual prosperity and excellence in its operations through forming and maintaining quality people via the process of attracting, developing, engaging and inspiring them (Liker and Hoseus, 2007). In this regard, people are the heart and soul of Toyota’s culture. In connection with this, the failure would significantly come in if people are not willing to go for change in the first place. It is in this reason that the need to change the culture is necessary because as already stated, a great portion of the failure is more likely caused by the culture. In the case of Toyota, the kind of culture it manifests prior to its success in the implementation of business approaches is the ability to learn and align it all to the prevailing best practices in the company. It is truly significant that only few organisations would be able to make it to the end when employing some business approaches, because the real score is in line with the whole management system that is truly a complex consideration to take into account. The whole thing about the implementation of business approaches is not only about a consideration of a single factor, but including and not limited to operation, training and culture change. These are some of the most important points that needed to be considered when an organisation would want to succeed in its implementation of new business approaches prior to the achievement of its competitive advantage or a significant edge in its specific industry. However, it is clear that the entire consideration will have to greatly focus on the human resource. Implementing the new business approaches in the organisation is something that will have to take a greater consideration of the capacity of not just the whole system, but specifically of the people who will implement the necessary things to be done in order to create change that the organisation would want to achieve in the end. For this reason, the new business approaches are critical considerations of an organisation and it should be important to consider the level of readiness of the entire organisation to go for them. Failure to bear this in mind is the primary indicator of the probable failure of the new business approaches, because being able to consider how ready will be the entire organisation to go for change is one of the most important indicators of future organisational success. References Denning, S. (2011) Why Lean Programs Fail – Where Toyota Succeeds: A New Culture of Learning [online] available from [27 April 2014]. Guimaraes, T. (1999) ‘Field testing of the proposed predictors of BPR success in manufacturing firms.’ Journal of Manufacturing Systems 18(1), 53-65. Johnson, L. M. (2011) Experiencing Corrections: From Practitioner to Professor. London: SAGE. Khosrowpour, M. (2000) Challenges of Information Technology Management in the 21st Century. London: Idea Group Inc. Liker, J., and Hoseus, M. (2007) Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way. Hoboken, NJ: McGraw Hill Professional. Mohapatra, S., and Singh, R. P. (2012) Information Strategy Design and Practices. London: Springer. Mukherjee, P. N. (2006) Total Quality Management. New Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd. Pike, R. J., Barnes, R., and Barnes, R. J. (1995) TQM in Action: A Practical Approach to Continuous Performance Improvement. Norwich: Springer. Schrage, C. R. (1997) The Human Factors of Reengineering Organizations with Information Technology [online] available from [27 April 2014]. Taylor, W. A., and Wright, G. H. (2003) ‘A longitudinal study of TQM implementation: factors influencing success and failure.’ Omega 31(2), 97-111. Read More