Toyota Motor Corporation is Japan’s top auto manufacturer and has experienced si

Question

Toyota Motor Corporation is Japan’s top auto manufacturer and has experienced significant growth in global sales over the past two decades. A key issue facing Toyota is the design of its global production and distribution network. Part of Toyota’s global strategy is to open factories in every market it serves. Toyota must decide what the production capability of each of the factories will be, as this has a significant impact on the desired distribution system. At one extreme, each plant can be equipped only for local production. At the other extreme, each plant is capable of supplying every market. Prior to 1996, Toyota used specialized local factories for each market. After the Asian financial crisis in 1996/1997, Toyota redesigned its plants so that it could also export to markets that remain strong when the local market weakens. Toyota calls this strategy “global complementation.”

Whether to be global or local is also an issue for Toyota’s parts plants and product design. Should parts plants be built for local production or should there be few parts plants globally that supply multiple assembly plants? Toyota has worked hard to increase commonality in parts used around the globe. While this helped the company lower costs and improve parts availability, common parts caused significant difficulty when one of the parts had to be recalled. In 2009, Toyota had to recall about 12 million cars using common parts across North America, Europe and Asia causing significant damage to the brand as well as the finances.

Any global manufacturer like Toyota must address the following questions regarding the configuration and capability of the supply chain:

1. Where should the plants be located and what degree of flexibility should be built into each? What capacity should each plant have?

2. Should plants be able to produce for all markets or only specific contingency markets?

3. How should markets be allocated to plants and how frequently should this allocation be revised?

4. What kind of flexibility should be built into the distribution system?

5. How should this flexible investment be valued?

6. What actions may be taken during product design to facilitate this flexibility?

Explanation / Answer

1. The plant should be located on the basics of global complementation strategy and should be designed in a way to have the capacity to supply to its regional factories. The Toyota has spread its 45 plant around the world to cater the customer need. These plants are designed with the flexibility to manufacture various different models under same unit of plant.

2. Toyota plant should target to supply to at least one market / region; but their plant should be flexible and capable to supply to other market when their local market demand is weak.

3. Market of Toyota should be allocated on the basics of standard allocations during the phase of planning. The frequency of review should be regulated and conducted annually or twice in a year.

4. The distribution system should be flexible and cost effective to optimize regionally between the factories and their supplying parts plants to local market.

5. Toyota should capture demand and revenue from non-local markets with the use of its valuable supply chain which have easy access to the market.

6. During the product design the Toyota Design Engineers should craft the elements in such a way to maintain uniformity among its global products to facilitates the flexibility to the market.

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