Toyota Motor Company : The World 's Leading Auto Manufacturers Essay

The word “crisis” can be defined as any of the following definitions; “an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person's life; the decisive moment during an event; or an unstable or crucial time or state of affairs in which a decisive change is impending, especially: one with the distinct possibility of a highly undesirable outcome.” (Crisis).

In 2009 Toyota encountered a public backlash after the discovery of a potentially catastrophic engineering defect among its brand of automobiles including its best-selling Corolla and Camry models. This led to a massive and global recall of approximately 10 million units a year later. The engineering defect caused the models to accelerate out of control and put their drivers and other

What measures would you recommend that Toyota Europe take to resolve the continuing operating losses?

Toyota grew at a record speed and could not keep up with the speed in which it was growing. They are a centralized company and Japan only made the decisions. This prevented the company to keep up with the safety problems. The process that Toyota external suppliers follow when improving product and making sure the product is functioning properly before shipping to Toyota needs to be improved before they release the product from their warehouse to be sent to Toyota. This problem began when the company started to rapidly grow. Toyota’s lack of communication led to the faulty gas pedal recall.

Crisis management can be classified as a procedure with which an individual organization or organizations can manage a key occurrence that endangers or threatens the institution, its stakeholders, or even the public at large (Birkland, 2006). Lerbinger (1997) identifies 7 types of crises as follows:

A crisis is a situation that seriously and immediately threatens one or more of an organization's four vital assets: life, property, operations/income, and reputation. Crises are characteristically uncommon, unpredictable, and sudden, demanding immediate responses in order to save lives, avert secondary damage, and restore normal operations.

The Crisis Response Team will declare the level of emergency or crisis that is occurring.

A crisis is a major, unpredictable event that threatens to harm the organization and its stakeholders. Although crisis events are unpredictable,they are not unexpected .More specifically, crisis can be characterized as the confluence of human, organizational and technology failures combined with regulatory, infrastructure and preparedness shortcomings within the organization.

Due to Toyota’s financial greed and unethical practice, vehicles were wrongly equipped with faulty brakes, sticking pedals and poor quality door looks, which caused death of many Toyota customers and hundreds of dollars in damages. When a company like Toyota acts in an ethically questionable manner, it causes the company to lose customers and develop a negative reputation. Customer tend to lose faith in the company and have to look for better service

What is a crisis management? It is an unexpected crisis that happens on the company that will affect the trust and loyalty of the stakeholder. It can be extremely costly because it will affect the company reputation and brand. For example like financial failure from poor business management, workplace violence, fires, cybercrime, computer viruses, product tampering or union strikes and other external issue like damaged economy that causes from London bombings, terrorists attacks on 11 September and others. The SHRM 2005 report indicates that only 56% organizations created or revised their disaster preparedness plans but 45% did not after the terrorist attacked on

GM has developed an Enterprise Demand Sensing Research Program to investigate methodologies and drive a collaborative decision-making framework. The program aims to improve the decision-making of the enterprise in procurement, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and logistics (Truss, Wu, Saroop & Sehgal, 2006). To enhance enabling technologies, GM places considerable importance on internal communication. GM launched some major efforts to communicate throughout the organization. These included roundtable discussion groups, and the training of managers

In 2009 Toyota Motors (TM) posted a net loss of $4.6 billion ("Market watch," 2014). From 2009 to 2011 Toyota encountered a number of factors contributing to their economic downturn. It began with recalling millions of vehicles, for quality related problems, followed by natural disasters hitting northeastern Japan. These disasters wiped out Toyota’s production capabilities (Tabuchi & Vlasic, 2014). While these events were occurring, the cloud of the 2008 global financial crisis was still being felt. This crisis weakened demand in the automotive industry. This weakened demand increased the competitive landscape for all automotive manufactures. This drove down automotive prices and effectively contribution margins (i.e. sold less

We will start the external analysis with the PESTEL analysis of the automotive sector followed by the Porter’s five forces analysis and we will end by having a look at the key competitors and competitor pricing.

Ford Motor Company was incorporated in Delaware in 1919. They acquired the business of a Michigan company, also known as Ford Motor Company, which had been incorporated in 1903 to produce and sell automobiles designed and engineered by Henry Ford. They are one of the world’s largest producers of cars and trucks. They and their subsidiaries also engage in other businesses, including financing vehicles.

Toyota is a key player in global automotive market. Its structure constitutes if various production plants in different locations and a very strong branding which helps it capture a major market share. Like other enterprises, Toyota has several strengths and weakness which makes it what it is now. Toyota heavily invests in Research and development which helps it come up reputable product line which is spread out throughout the world because of its strengthening global distribution network however its recent product recalling, loose grip in key geographic areas and wrong allocation of resources shows that even a strong brand like Toyota has its weaknesses.