Page 211 - Toyota Under Fire

TOYOT A UNDER FIRE

That will give customers several opportunities to ask questions or
express concerns so that, if the issue is a simple misunderstanding
of a feature like cruise control, it won’t grow into mistrust of the
company or the vehicle. At the same time, it will give Toyota a
better source of data on customer wants and needs and how cus-
tomers are using their vehicles. That’s particularly important in
the United States, with its unique model of independently owned
dealers. By law, Toyota cannot own the dealers who are the pri-
mary point of contact with customers. Thus, the company has
to rely on dealers to capture and relay information from custom-
ers. An ongoing challenge for Toyota will be working with the
network of dealers to make sure that accurate and complete in-
formation is flowing back to the company at a level of detail that
will enable any problems or concerns to be thoroughly analyzed,
root causes to be determined, and appropriate action to be taken.

Putting Customers First in
Engineering and Manufacturing

Under the mandate of the special committee on global quality,
various departments also took steps to streamline their processes
related to customer information and to increase their responsive-
ness to customers. Uchiyamada’s team had this responsibility for
engineering. As Uchiyamada described in his team’s root-cause
analysis, the process of funneling customer information to engi-
neers was far from efficient:

A customer would have an issue, and they would report
it to the dealer. And then the dealer would send their re-
ports to TMS. TMS sent it to the quality department in
Japan. And then the quality department looked at the

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