Toyota Case Study: Toyota's Toyota Market

Toyota’s early entry into market was relatively struggling. In 1957, Toyota attempted to come in the United Stated market, by creating a subsidiary in California. Later, it confirmed to be a nightmare; the Toyota automobiles performed badly in road tests on U.S. highways. Evidently, Toyota had not done enough homework on the basic local circumstances in U.S. marketplace, basically how Americans used vehicles. Due to be short of of local responsiveness, Toyota closed down its US subsidiary and left from the market. Back home, the company began to study the feedback from American customer surveys and U.S. road tests, reshaped numerous of its models consequently, and reformed its market reputation significantly in U.S. market late 1960s, selling well with welcomed invention characteristics and consistently reducing retail prices and production cost. Thanks to the oil price increase following the Israeli/Arab conflict, U.S. customers shifted to small fuel-efficient vehicles in droves. Toyota was among the major beneficiaries. Though this wants for small fuel-efficient automobiles in U.S. market occurred without Toyota’s forecast, it matched to the usual order for this nature due to the short of natural resources at home, in Japan. This could be seen at kind of knowledge transfer and learning effect within universal markets, that is, transfer of collective information accomplished at Japanese function to U.S. market. However, market changes. In early 1980s, import quotas imposed by United Stated over Toyota stagnated sell abroad growth considerably. To handle with this crisis, Toyota’s initial overseas operation, NUMMI, was born. This step could be taken as a tactical access of Toyota in U.S. market further. In this deal, Toyota design...

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... (green boxes). With eight line sections, the plant still has less than Kyushu (eleven sections), but more than in 1994 (six sections) and much more than before 1994 (three to four sections). Each small blue box below represents one station along the line or, in most cases, around one employee (not counting group leaders and team).

The accurate number of people in the line relies also on the consumer demand. One of the ways to adjust the productivity of the line is by removing or adding employees. The greatly mechanized welding line was much quicker, being able to manufacture one chassis in just over one minute. Amusingly, Toyota used a pull system rather than cramming the line full with chassis. New chassis were discharged only at the speed at which the assembly line could take them; thus there were always inactive stations without any chassis in the welding line.