Restoring Toyotas Reputation - Essay Example

The blow based on reputation was very damaging (Costea 2010). The first thing Toyota should have done is to clarify any point that the consumer needed to know more about the problem that had caused the recalling of cars. Toyota actually did this right as good management would do. They came up with a way to confront the criticism put forward and to respond to any questions and points that needed clarification to the consumer. Their strategy to handle all the inquisitions was through social media using Social Digs, Twitter and Facebook (Toyota 2009).

The next step would be to immediately identify where they had gone wrong during the production that affected the quality of the final product. Somewhere along the line of production an error must have occurred to cause the problem that would come to affect the quality and thus damage the reputation of Toyota (Ohnsman and Kitamura 2010). After performing this review and identifying where the production had gone wrong, they should have mended that loophole. The better way of dealing with this was for the management to change the system of reviewing quality in cars.

This would build some confidence and form assurance of a proper method of evaluating quality to the consumers who have become distrustful of the current method of checking for quality. If the management changes the evaluation system and makes this public, they will reassure the public of good quality and in turn revive their reputation (Anon, 2010). The Toyota management should also try to make policies that consider the customer’s point of view in their implementation. They should not make cars with the quality that they feel they need to be producing, but they should make cars with the quality standards that their customers need in a car, making the production be all about what the customer needs.

There was a lot of speculation on the cause of the acceleration in the Toyota cars. Some of the critics even cited a ridiculous claim such as electric faults in the cars (Kaufman 2010). The management should thus have fit the Toyota cars with an event data recorder that would record all the data a car outputs, and thus the cause of the problem would have been quickly identified, hence avoiding speculation from critics that would be more damaging to the product. The company should also have set up regional technical offices to help evaluate the cars needed to recall.

In 2009, they had to recall entire shipments of cars. There was no evaluation on the status of the car regionally, which led to massive recalling. Analysis at a regional level would have reduced the number of cars being taken back to the company greatly by solving some of the technical issues regionally. The Toyota has raised its reputation since the 2009 crisis, and it was rated at number 74 as of 2012 (Davis 2012). Coming up with a new managerial structure that is set to achieve proper marketing of the product will see them get their competitive edge back and rise to the level they were before.

One such structure is the organisation of the TNGA planning division that will see the company realise the Toyota Global Vision (Toyota 2013). To sustain Toyota’s competitive advantage, they have come up with a Kaizen approach in lean production. The Kaizen approach involves continual development and implementation of new better changes in its method of production. It brings in team effort and the opinion of each team player is considered and evaluated on the improvement in the production system.

This system has great improvement in the