Page 205 - Toyota Under Fire
P. 205

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE


            The creation of the chief quality officer role in every region
        was one of the innovations by Akio Toyoda that advanced re-
        spect for regional authority, one of the most important steps in
        reforming the recall process so that input from the regions and
        from customers fed more directly into it. These executives over-
        see all quality-related issues before and after production, are a
        part of the global quality committee, and are key participants
        in the recall decision process. They ensure that any issues that
        are discovered in any region are quickly made known to other
        regions—remember that one of the key failings in the sticky
        pedal situation was not communicating the findings in Europe
        to North American leaders. Steve St. Angelo described one of the
        key conclusions from a meeting of all the managing officers on
        the quality committee: “As Toyota grew globally, we were still try-
        ing to run Toyota within Japan. And I think one thing we learned
        here is that the different regions understand the customer, un-
        derstand the regulations, understand the regions much better
        than you would running it from Japan. We need more autonomy,
        more self-reliance in the different regions.”
            All the chief quality officers participate in regular conference
        calls with one another and with the central engineering group
        in Japan that is responsible for quality and safety. They also now
        have access to a global database of issues, so there are no regional
        information silos on any quality or safety issue. To make sure
        information continues to be shared widely in North America,
        Steve St. Angelo convened a North American Quality Task Force
        that holds a weekly conference call and meets face to face peri-
        odically. The task force includes all the managing officers from
        Toyota Motor Sales, from Toyota Motor America, from TEMA,
        and from Canada.




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