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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