Total Quality Management Of Toyota

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a management approach that originated in the 1950s and has progressively become more popular since the early 1980s. TQM means that the organization’s culture is defined by and supports the constant attainment of customer satisfaction through an integrated system of tools, techniques, and training. This involves the continuous improvement of organisational processes, resulting in high quality products and services.

The objective of TQM to be implemented are to improve the process, prevent defection, priorities efforts, developing cause-relationships, measuring system capacity, developing improvement checklist and check forms, helping teams make better decisions, developing operational definitions, separating trivial from significant needs, and observing behavior changes over a period of time.

3.0 Total Quality Management (TQM) of Toyota.

For Toyota, the most essential efforts are what have took place in the late 1960s. At that time Toyota, a truck manufacturer, decided to start producing passenger cars and they made a strong-minded effort to appraise and improve their methods at a fundamental level. They succeeded phenomenonally at this and by the year 1980s, they were producing the utmost quality automobiles in the world. They called their new methods "Total Productive Maintenance" or TPM.

Later, Toyota have discovered what was the dominant root of the manufactured goods defects was the wear and tear in the machinery that made those parts. The root cause of the wear and tear of the machinery was caused by the buildup of dust and chips (metal shavings). The catastrophe was that the employees followed the basic American procedure which was to run a machine until it broke and finally call in the engineer to repair the machine. In some cases they would just throw the machine away and order a new one from America. This resulted in flawed parts as the machine wore down and interrupted the productivity due to the machine waiting to be repaired or replaced. Furthermore, another complication faced was that the employees tended to move from machine to another and frequently resulted in confusion. How can a systemic troubles like this be fixed? In order to solve this, Toyota completely changed the method they operated its production.

3.1 Improve the process

In the first step, they stopped rotating the employees around and assigned employees to be responsible over individual machines. Next, employees are required to keep a particular notebooks documenting their individual assigned machine. Before this was done machines were more or less black boxes to the workers. The new method requires the men to document not only how the machine operated, but its whole maintenance history and how it worked internally. Employees started taking apart their machines to study about it and record their findings. Instead of hoarding mechanical knowledge in a few absentee engineers, each and every employee started to have this type of knowledge.

3.2 Prevent defection

The next step was to tackle the dirt. In the 1965 Toyota's factories looked like American factories: chips and dirt everywhere. They would change that. Since dirt was responsible for the wear that was causing defects it would be eliminated. They started on the outside by creating sweeping and cleaning regimens. Then they started regularly taking apart their machines to clean them. Finally they put their expertise to work and started designing special guards and covers to keep dirt and chips out of machines permanently.

3.3 Priorities efforts

The last step in the equation was systematic preventative maintenance. Part of their documentation efforts was to carefully study any irregularity in machine operation. For example, if a machine began to vibrate in the old days they would ignore it until the machine broke, like Americans. In the new way they would immediately stop any machine that was vibrating and take apart the machine to discover the cause. Because they now actually had started to learn how the machines worked internally this was possible. The worker (NOT an engineer) would then attempt to fix the problem. In some cases these procedures led Toyota to actually redesign and modify parts inside their tooling to improve it.

3.4 Developing cause-relationships

In order for them to perform brilliantly, there are two prerequisites.  First, everyone has to agree on what they want, and second everyone has to agree on cause and effect.  Let’s assume that everyone in your organization agrees on the results they want, their values and priorities, and the trade-offs they are willing to make in order to achieve those results.  The question to ask is "does everyone agree on cause and effect?".

Is there general agreement on what actions will result in system-wide cost reduction?  Are individual departments expected to reduce costs independently, or is it clear that departments must work together to reduce overall system costs, even at the expense of costs in individual departments? Are the measurements in place to reduce the costs of crossing boundaries?

Is there general agreement on the best way to achieve consistent results through standardization?  Are standards always followed?  If not, do you really understand the root cause – are the standards irrelevant or inaccurate, too complex, or too far from the actual work being done? Are standards maintained by a central process group, or are they continually improved by the people doing the work?  Are front line people expected and encouraged to continually challenge and change standards?

Do you have a project scheduling system aimed at optimizing utilization?  Does the management team believe that the system is in fact optimizing utilization? Do people believe that full utilization is the right measurement to emphasize? Is time-to-market an important factor in your business? Does everyone agree on the relationship between time-to-market and utilization?

The end results of these efforts are well-known, not only did Toyota start making the highest quality cars in the world but by 1980 they dominated the import market. Today Toyota is the most profitable car manufacturer in the world by a large margin.

3.5 Quality Measurement

The management has come out with its own checklist for individual departments to measure its quality. This is because different departments have different ways of doing things. This checklist from time to time they can measure the quality of it and to continuously improve it.

3.6 Customer Satisfaction

All the integrated system of tools, techniques, training and continuous improvement off organizational processes being used in Toyota is to reach a common goal which is to satisfies its’ customers. In Malaysia itself, most car consumers prefers Toyota’s car. From the word of mouth of the consumers, we could hear lots of compliment on Toyota’s car. Some is praising Toyota for their reliability of customer service, the features of car safety, higher market value and so on.

4.0 Conclusion

The managerial trends of TQM definitely show positive results in Toyota. TQM were implemented, and Toyota have improved their process, prevent defection, priorities efforts, helping teams make better decisions, and most importantly improve their customer satisfaction to be the most profitable car manufacturer in the world today. TQM is applied to ensure the continuous improvement in quality of their products and also customer service in the company. This also would create a systematic and control working environment to ensure smooth operations and to create a better working environment.

Introduction

The role for the human resource management is evolving with the change in today’s competitive market environment and the realization that they must play a more strategic role in the success of an organization. An organization needs to be more adaptable, resilient, agile, and customer-focused to succeed. But the same old challenges faces by most organizations throughout the world are the equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity.

Human Resource Management (HRM) are important because it can be significant source of competitive advantages as the people-oriented HR give an organization an edge by creating superior shareholder value, to achieve competitive success through people whereby managers must change how they think about their employees and how they view the work relationship and to treat them as partners rather than costs to be minimized, and lastly improving to high-performance work practices.

Other than that, HRM in every organization should implement equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity to ensure the workplaces is free from all forms of unlawful discrimination and harassment. But this is rather tricky as human behaviors and word of mouth is difficult to manage or to be controlled. Additional to that, the HRM should ensure that their organizations are ready to deliver a good quality service to their customers.

Equal Employment Opportunity and the Management of Diversity

Equal employment opportunity for all employees means, the employees are treated fairly, free from discrimination and harassment. All the employees are treated equally without regards to race, color, religion or belief, national, social or ethnic origin, sex (including pregnancy), age, physical, mental or sensory disability, HIV status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital, civil union or domestic partnership status, past or present military service, family medical history or genetic information, family or parental status, or any other status protected by the laws or regulations. Meanwhile, management of diversity is the focus on maximizing the ability of these employees to contribute to organizational goals.

In the western developed countries like United States, the equal employment opportunity and the management of diversity is a very sensitive issue. In the U.S., there are several laws that supports this and they are ‘Equal Pay Act’, ‘Civil Right Act’, ‘Age Discrimination in Employment Act’, ‘Vocational Rehabilitation Act’, ‘Americans with Disabilities Act’, and many more to protect the employee to be treated fairly in a workplace environment.

Management of diversity should implement fair practices and behavior in the workplace to ensure new employees are being recruited fairly, selection and promotion process are based on the best applicant for the job, access for all employee to training and development, flexible working arrangements that meet the needs of employees to create a productive workplace, involving employees in the decision making process without bias on their decisions, access to information and allows their views to be heard, grievance handling procedures that are accessible to all employee and deal with workplace complaints promptly, confidentially and fairly.

Example 1: There is a vacancy in company A, the interviewer who is a Chinese man interviews the first applicant who is a Malay lady for a vacancy position. Although the first applicants fulfill the qualification requirements for the position, she is rejected due to the difference of race and religion. Next applicant, a Chinese man who does not fulfill the required qualifications for the position is accepted.

The example above shows that the management of the company A is not treating fairly and they are being bias and racist.

Example 2: An interviewer who happens to be a Malay guy interviews a Malay lady candidate. The candidate does not fulfill all the requirements to perform the job but she is required by the interviewer to perform sexually treatment for him in order for her to get the job.

In the Example 2, we can see that the interviewer is sexually harassing the candidate to secure the vacant position in the company and this is against the Equal Employment Opportunity.

Example 3: There is a job posting of a vacancy for a pilot position in the airlines company. Michael applied for the position and went to meet the interviewer, Jonathan although Michael is blind. Jonathan has to turn down Michael’s application as being unfit for the position.

In example 3, although the Equal Employment Opportunity emphasis of not to discriminate the differences of race, gender, religion, and many more, in this case Jonathan who is the interviewer have not violates the law as the law recognize that a visually impaired person could not be an airline pilot.

3.0 Quality Readiness

Quality readiness of an organization’s products or services is the reliably of what it is supposed to do and to satisfy the customers’ expectations. Quality problems are indeed expensive.

Many experts believe the organizations unable to produce high quality products and would not able to compete successfully in the marketplace. An issue that a manager must address is "How is quality achieved?" A good way to look at what kind of quality to be achieved is by planning and set a specific target to achieve the desired quality. Information on the quality of a product which the consumer wants or expected can be obtained by having a questionnaire or studies on the consumers.

Next, after information is obtained, it should be discuss within the Research and Development team to either set the standard of a quality what a consumers expect or to do some amendments to the expected outputs of the products or services to be outstanding. The team then should organize within the product line or the service provider team.

To achieve the specific desire quality, the team should be lead to understand, exposed, or sent to training to improve their knowledge in order to reach the common goal set by the organization.

Lastly, it is important to control it to ensure that the quality does not deteriorate. In the past, organizations do not bother the quality once the products or services are successful in the market. Some choose to reduce the quality of it to maximize their profit and some choose to ignore the deterioration of its quality. But in the recent years, quality is so important to organizations to remain competitive in the market. Organizations spend an expensive price tag to maintain and improve their quality to satisfy the customers and to remain top in the market.

Example 4: Even though Apple has had phenomenal success with iPod, the batteries in the first three versions died after 4 hours instead of lasting it up to 12 hours that the buyers expects. Apple settlement with consumers cost close to $100 million.

In the Example above, the company pays a hefty price for the defect of quality to the consumers as the products is not a good quality.

Example 5: Mobile Company A has just design and creates a new edge technology smart phone. They manufactured a small number of it to be given to the employees of the company to be tested out. Then the employees are required to comments or gave suggestions on the products. This comments and suggestions will be taken and the company will improve the quality of the smart phones.

In this example, we could see that the company is a quality conscious. The company is willing to manufacture a number of smart phones to be given out to the employees so that they could improve the quality or any defects of the smart phones before they could market it out to consumers around the world.

Example 6: In the line production line, a checklist is being given to the quality control employees. This quality checklist is to ensure that every parts of the electronic chip components are being installed before it is given to another department for further installation process.

In the example 6, a checklist is being used to ensure that every single electronic chip is being installed rather than depending on human brain to remember what chips to be installed.

4.0 Recommendations

In Malaysia, the government should revise the law, to come up with a strict enforcement to avoid discrimination and harassment to the employees. This will guarantee the government agencies and organizations in the private sectors to ensure that their working environments are implementing management diversity to ensure the employees are being treated fairly and maximizing the ability of these employees to contribute to organizational goals.

Quality readiness is a must have thing in an organization. Tools such as checklist, questionnaires, customer service, feedback form, and many more could be used to obtain feedback, complains or suggestions from their consumers. This will eventually help them to know what the weakness areas are and they could find ways to improve the quality or its products or services. Sending employees for training from time to time also could help to maintain and improve the quality of the products or services and at the mean time the employees can develop further their skills and knowledge, reduce staff turnovers, reduce errors, improve productivity and improve the organization competitiveness. All this will ensure a the quality to improve from time to time to ensure it is at the acceptable level and ready to be provided to its consumers.

5.0 Conclusion

Human resource management will be facing numbers of challenges such as quality readiness, equal employment opportunity (EEO) and the management of diversity. To ensure that the organization is practicing EEO and management of diversity, everyone should play their part to obey the law and to practice a fair, free from discrimination and harassment to create a healthy working environment. Quality readiness it essential to organizations as it helps them to improve the quality of products or services from time to time to remain competitive in the market. Quality assurance standards such as the ISO 9000 series can be achieve and obtained to be globally recognized in order to get consumers attention and confidence towards the organization.