Toyota rethinks the assembly line

It is hard to feel sorry for Toyota. It is a mammoth corporation and a force in its industry. Still the Japanese automaker has been going through a rough stretch. Some of its problems are surely of its own making (e.g., quality issues and recalls), but others are largely beyond its control (e.g., turmoil in the world [...]

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Postponement and importing cars

If you buy a Japanese built Toyota, where would you expect the final bit of assembly to be done? Would you believe Newark? The New York Times had an article on the process of receiving imported cars (Far From the Factory, Adding Final Touches, Sep 25). What is unsurprising is that car makers have processes [...]

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How the Japanese earthquake is shaking up an auto supplier

A few weeks ago we had a post on how Toyota is revamping its supply chain in anticipation of the next natural disaster. Now the Wall Street Journal has a story on how an auto supplier is trying to recover from March’s earthquake (Quake Still Rattles Suppliers, Sep 29). Take, for example, the tussle over a [...]

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Toyota gets ready for the next earthquake

Virtually every automaker took a significant hit when an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan back in March. (We have several posts on this.) What surprised many people — even to some in the auto industry — was that even non-Japanese firms suffered. Several firms did not find out until too late that a supplier to [...]

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Toyota’s next move

This week brought some possible good news for Toyota. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Transportation Department has studied data from a number of Toyota’s involved in crashes that supposedly were caused by sudden acceleration and found that “throttles were wide open and the brakes weren’t engaged at the time of  the crash” (Early [...]

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Toyota by the numbers

Lots has been happening with Toyota and we have had trouble keeping up. However there are couple of numbers and graphs that are worth noting.  The first is from the Wall Street Journal (Cause of Sudden Acceleration Proves Hard to Pinpoint, Feb 25). Click on the graphic for a better view: Gady had posted an [...]

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Toyota, AT&T and other odds and ends of the week

Here’s  few quick items we didn’t get around to writing full posts on. To begin it’s hard to say too much about Toyota this week. The Wall Street Journal had an interesting story today (Feb 6) on Toyota’s response to the crisis (A Crisis Made in Japan ).  The gist of its argument is that [...]

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The Andon Cord that wasn’t pulled (and the Toyota recall)

Very few events can send an ops professor to a long soul search. A Toyota mega recall is one of them. Marty already posted on a Wall Street Journal article, which discussed the relationship between lean operations and the recall. The New York Times has an excellent article on the issue (“Toyota’s Slow Awakening to [...]

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The Rise and Fall of the Toyotan Empire

Are we observing rise and (quick) fall of the of the Toyota?  The Economist had an interesting article about the recent issues at Toyota, saying that unless they can find a solution to their problems, their stint as the world biggest car maker may be short. (“Losing its shine”, December 2010). The article makes several [...]

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