Toyota 's Current Supply Management Strategy

Honda was identified as the partner who would provide and would fit in the political environment. Also, a Japanese firm did not appear threatening to the British competitors. Honda wanted to expand internationally. As benefits Honda was looking at using Rover's design studios, and selling engines to Rover. Also, the fact that no other European company would agree to a partnership with Honda combined with

The Ford Motor Company’s Supply Chain Management ABSTRACT The influx of foreign automobiles that flood the United States market is higher than ever before and American companies are struggling to adapt to this decrease in market share. Ford is one of the organizations that has restructured its supply chain strategy to better integrate suppliers into their system reducing cost and

Today, Toyota is the world's third largest manufacturer of automobiles in terms of both unit sales and net sales. It is also the largest Japanese automotive manufacturer, producing more than 5.5 million vehicles per year, equivalent to one every six seconds. See Appendix 1 for a list of its guiding principles. Appendix 2 depicts excerpts from the company’s 2000 annual report showing their main goals for that year. The company has 12 manufacturing plants in Japan and approximately 54 manufacturing companies in 27 countries throughout the world. These plants produce vehicles and components under the Lexus and Toyota brand names and employ about one quarter of a million people worldwide. In total Toyota vehicles are marketed and sold in more than 160 countries and regions with the automotive business, including sales and finance of the vehicles, accounting for more than 90% of the company's total sales. Appendix 3 shows worldwide sales and appendix 4 shows the models produced in North American Toyota plants. North Americanization of Toyota Since the late 1980’s Toyota had made several moves that showed their commitment to what management called the North Americanization of the company. The idea was to increase car sales in the lucrative North American market by also introducing manufacturing plants that produced parts and assembled whole vehicles for

Ducati has developed and managed their value chain very well. This contributes substantially to their strong position. I’ve already discussed Ducati’s effective management of Inbound Logistics and Operations. Ducati’s Outbound Logistics approach is oriented around brand management in each of its markets. This is accomplished through dedicated, single-franchise dealerships instead of multi-franchise dealerships. This decision means that Ducati seeks a high-value customer experience with lower volumes in lieu of a mass-market approach. This is a strategy that is consistent with being a niche player; it makes sense for the Japanese firms to have multi-franchise dealerships since they are close substitutes of each other.

Not honoring existing contracts, since this might be illegal and is breaking a promise GM made to the supplier who might have invested heavily for this contract.

It is easy to know from the figure 2 that Honda’s suppliers mainly from the Six big regions, Europe, North America, South America, Asia & Oceania, Japan

Drive Performance improvement in active supply base: If you have an existing relationship with a supplier, performance benchmarking can be a helpful tool for driving supplier relationship management activities. Instead of annual or periodic contractual assessments, review of performance metrics should be continuous process. Such an approach will allow you to stay ahead of supplier issues and facilitate performance benchmarking against their industry peers. Additionally, if you have a “problem” vendor, you can more easily determine where to assign additional resources to help remediate the risks.

Toyota and Honda succeeded in constructing effective supplier relationships because of the methods they used for it. In article they were the following:

From 1960-1973, the British share of the US market dropped from 49% to 9% - largely due to Honda’s entry and the subsequent market transformation from one dominated by heavy, powerful and expensive machines to one characterized by lightweight, reliable, and inexpensive motorcycles. The following excerpts from a BCG report to the British government recount the events of the day and offer an explanation for Honda’s success.

This is an industry where studying what satisfies the customer need more suitably is a very key factor. As a result of introduction of overseas products which are no longer least expensive but quite affordable and those that are of wide range to customers and helped the firm gain competitive advantage in the united states and this is a major advantage the company enjoys with control of 55 percent of motorcycle industry belonging to it. There is also a disadvantage that may result from the changing market demands and this is a wide variety from overseas. Some customers have a tendency of different tastes for products. One time they buy a product from one manufacturer but the second time they want to buy the same product they change the manufactured. In short they are tasting how the same product from different manufactures satisfy their need. This may pose a very negative challenge in case of such customers being part of their key target customers since if they buy from them one time next time they switch off to another

According to the Honda’s export strategy of “Honda and U.S. – Japan Automotive Trade”(1997), it is clearly that Honda focuses on regional markets which contributes to developing more sales, strong research and better development. And their strategy of manufacturing the products where or near to where they are sold is the result of their being local strategy. Additionally, focus on local market benefits

The supplier partnership model is a strategy that promotes world-class supplier quality in supply chains. During the 1980’s this approach began to gain momentum when manufacturers started to realise the shortcomings of traditional transaction based strategies. Organisations started to look at a wider picture that focused on more than just cost, quality and deliveries and began to accept that were additional benefits to be gained by taking a new approach to supplier relationships (Goffin, Lemke, & Szwejczewski, 2006).

The Honda brand image in Europe is relatively weak and the product line is narrow compared to the other major players in the market. The company needs to expand its sales and production to survive in global scale

Buoyed by SYM 's success, other foreign companies including Yamaha, Suzuki, Honda from Japan later jumped into the market.

The Chinese automobile market has grown by 1/3. This means that there is a lot more room for automobile companies like Honda to expand and grow. Honda will be able to increase its production and sales as the market will be bigger.