Toyota individual essay Essays

Toyota individual essay Essays Toyota individual essay Essay Toyota individual essay Essay If you sign the declaration below and it is found that the work submitted is not your own work, the University may impose penalties. Declaration: I declare that this assignment is my individual work, have not copied from any other students work or from any other source except where due acknowledgement is made explicitly in the text, nor has any part been written for me by another person. If this assignment is submitted after the due date, I understand that it will incur a penalty for lateness unless I have previously had an extension of time proved and have attached the written confirmation of this extension. Signature of Student GHz,Wang Date 201 3/119 DUE DATE RECEIVED DATE Individual essay Introduction: The global automobile industry had reached 1,640 billion dollars in 201 0, and the market value is forecasted to increase 49. 3% since 2010 to 2,449. 2 billion dollars in 201 5 (Marketing, 2011 Toyota, which takes up 6. 8% of global industry value, has just experienced its recall crisis from September 29th 2009 to January 27th 2010. More than 9 million cars and trucks around the world in the whole world were recalled by Toyota (Chris, P. Roger, W. , G. , 2010). Toyota was immersed in trough because of these faults and bad luck, and the public image is also seriously damaged. At present, Toyota is been returning on track gradually, and according to the report from Toyota Motor Sales, SACS, Inc. , its sales increased 17. 2% to 161 ,695 units in November 2012 because Toyota only sold 137,960 units in November of 2011 (Marketing 2012). These bad luck and breakdowns are very serious to any company which would encounter, so Toyota expressed its professional skills and abilities to handle these crises which are advanced in the automobile industry. New CEO of Toyota, Kaki Toyota, brought some improvements to companys operations and supply chain strategy. This critique will focus on three aspects of these changes, namely quality management, new product development and cost reduction, respectively, and in addition, some academic theories will be applied to explain these strategies Discussion: Quality management: The core competitive advantage of Toyota in the past was the high quality, and the main cause of the recall crisis was also quality problem. Nearly all firms pay much effort to quality improvement to achieve goals like cost deduction, higher customer satisfaction, more loyalty from customer, and better performance from financial and market aspects (Versa, R, Borer, K. K. , 2010). In general, costs of company are from internal failure costs, external failure costs, assurance costs and prevention costs. Quality control system reduces some costs such as internal costs but the accompanying results are higher assurance costs and prevention costs. In the wrong cost reduction program taken by Toyota, the less spend in assurance costs and prevention cost made Toyota move quality from the first principle replaced by outputs, aid by Kaki Toyota. Total quality management (TTS), six sigma and many other quality improvement approaches are depended on customer feedback (Paned, p. S. , Caving, R. R. , Neumann, R. P. , 2000), and the system taken by Toyota which called Toyota production system has the same characteristic. Another approach for quality improvement comes from employee feedback, In Toyota, quality circle (ICQ) and the concept of Kamikaze are required (Deeming,W. , 1970), and however, these essential operation elements have risk of gradually missing in the rapid expansion. In order to save the deteriorating profits brought by trade conflicts and the revaluation of yen, Toyota increased its overseas productions steadily. In the period between 2000 and 2009, overseas production of Toyota increased by more than 10 percent annually, higher than the increase of Honda and Ionians (Gang, 2010). As a result, it is difficult to implement tacit knowledge in abroad production bases to ensure quality control and efficiency in manufacturing. According to annual report in 201 0, CEO of Toyota, Kaki Toyota put forward some improvements in operation and supply chain strategy to improve laity management.. 1. Toyota establishes new quality assurance system in order to ensure security and safety based on the perspectives of customers. 2. Set up a Special Committee General Overview of Quality Issues for global quality (Figure 1 3. Some specific measures to improve quality and safety, which include three aspects: A) Strengthen the monitoring functions including better information gathering function, more technical offices, assisting root cause analysis by using Remote Communications Functions (RCA) and onboard event data recorders (DARED), better information analysis ND better safety decision-making process. B) Enhancing information disclosure to regain trust from customers C) Establishing five Customer First Training Center to develop Toasts human resource and maintain quality. New product development: New product development is also the soul of Toasts value network so Kaki Toyota enhanced and improved this process. New products may fail in the fierce competition, and this has been proved in many industries. However, the mass benefits brought by new products can always push enterprises to take this process, either the Toyota. Firstly, these new products are always the resources of competitive advantage, and if enterprises take the leading role in the emerging product categories the effects will be more obvious. In the automobile industry, new energy cars are the new development direction, and according to the report from Lei and Line (2011), Toyota will develop 10 kinds of cars in this field. Secondly, firms which develop new products will enhance their corporate image and Brand name. Further, Toyota wants to satisfy the needs from customers worldwide when provide clean and safe products, so Toyota put tremendous efforts to RD activities which are regarded to improve the quality of people (Toyota, 2012). With the help from outsides experts, Toyota regularly reviewed research issues like energy, information technology, materials to achieve the goal of efficient cost control (Toyota, 2010). Cost Reduction: The third aspect is the cost reduction which needs enterprises implement changes on both operation and logistic structure. Since the revaluation of the yen, adding the price rise of raw materials and human resource in Japan especially after the big earthquake in 2011. The cost of production in Japan as jumped dramatically, so Toyota pays more efforts to localization production to implement cost reduction (including maintain RD process quality with less expense) which can be analyzed from the annual reports from 2009 to 2012 (Figure 2). Conclusion: In Summary, by applying some strong improvements in quality management, Toyota recovers its quality crisis quickly and restores confidence from customer about automobile quality which was the core competitive advantage of Toyota. New products development helps Toyota improve its competitive ability and enhance its corporate image and brand name.

Environmental Determinism Definition

Environmental Determinism Definition Throughout the study of geography, there have been some different approaches to explaining the development of the worlds societies and cultures. One that received much prominence in geographic history but has declined in recent decades of academic study is environmental determinism. Environmental Determinism Environmental determinism is the belief that the environment, most notably its physical factors such as landforms and climate, determines the patterns of human culture and societal development. Environmental determinists believe that ecological, climatic, and geographical factors alone are responsible for human cultures and individual decisions. Also, social conditions have virtually no impact on cultural development. The main argument of environmental determinism states that an areas physical characteristics like climate have a substantial impact on the psychological outlook of its inhabitants. These different outlooks then spread throughout a population and help define the overall behavior and culture of a society. For instance, it was said that areas in the tropics were less developed than higher latitudes because the continuously warm weather there made it easier to survive and thus, people living there did not work as hard to ensure their survival. Another example of environmental determinism would be the theory that island nations have unique cultural traits solely because of their isolation from continental societies. Environmental Determinism and Early Geography Although environmental determinism is a relatively recent approach to formal geographic study, its origins go back to ancient times. Climatic factors, for example, were used by Strabo, Plato, and Aristotle to explain why the Greeks were so much more developed in the early ages than societies in hotter and colder climates. Additionally, Aristotle came up with his climate classification system to explain why people were limited to settlement in certain areas of the globe.​​ Other early scholars also used environmental determinism to explain not only the culture of a society but the reasons behind the physical characteristics of a societys people. Al-Jahiz, a writer from East Africa, for instance, cited environmental factors as the origin of different skin colors. He believed that the darker skin of many Africans and various birds, mammals, and insects was a direct result of the prevalence of black basalt rocks on the Arabian Peninsula. Ibn Khaldun, an Arab sociologist, and scholar was officially known as one of the first environmental determinists. He lived from 1332 to 1406, during which time he wrote a complete world history and explained that the hot climate of Sub-Saharan Africa caused dark human skin.​ Environmental Determinism and Modern Geography Environmental determinism rose to its most prominent stage in modern geography beginning in the late 19th Century when it was revived by the German geographer Friedrich Rtzel and became the central theory in the discipline. Rtzels theory came about following Charles Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 and was heavily influenced by evolutionary biology and the impact a person’s environment has on their cultural evolution. Environmental determinism then became popular in the United States in the early 20th Century when Rtzel’s student, Ellen Churchill Semple, a professor at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts, introduced the theory there. Like Rtzel’s initial ideas, Semple’s were also influenced by evolutionary biology. Another one of Rtzel’s students, Ellsworth Huntington, also worked on expanding the theory around the same time as Semple. Huntingtons work though, led to a subset of environmental determinism, called climatic determinism in the early 1900s. His theory stated that the economic development in a country could be predicted based on its distance from the equator. He said temperate climates with short growing seasons stimulate achievement, economic growth, and efficiency. The ease of growing things in the tropics, on the other hand, hindered their advancement. The Decline of Environmental Determinism Despite its success in the early 1900s, environmental determinism’s popularity began to decline in the 1920s as its claims were often found to be wrong. Also, critics claimed it was racist and perpetuated imperialism. Carl Sauer, for instance, began his critiques in 1924 and said that environmental determinism led to premature generalizations about an area’s culture and did not allow for results based on direct observation or other research. As a result of his and others criticisms, geographers developed the theory of environmental possibilism to explain cultural development. Environmental possibilism was set forth by the French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche and stated that the environment sets limitations for cultural development, but it does not wholly define culture. Culture is instead defined by the opportunities and decisions that humans make in response to dealing with such limitations. By the 1950s, environmental determinism was almost entirely replaced in geography by environmental possibilism, effectively ending its prominence as the central theory in the discipline. Regardless of its decline, however, environmental determinism was an important component of geographic history as it initially represented an attempt by early geographers to explain the patterns they saw developing across the globe.