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Process Improvement EssayABSTRACTThis document will be evaluating an existing mental demonstrate within Toyota during the time of their heavy weapon crisis. A problem statement will be defined around the swear out of inseparable colloquy of concerns and vagarys between foreign-based Toyota employees and the authoritative management of Toyota based in Japan.PROBLEM ANALYSIS OF SELECTED PROCESSProblem framing is a very classic, but easily overlooked, part of decision-making. Framing a problem can impart a heavy influence on the decisions that are make. It isnt enough to frame the problem it should be framed with the solution in mind. This helps to keep the end closing of the decision-making process in mind so that the correct choices are do. In the case of Toyota, at the highest level, they had a major problem with slightly of their products involving unintended speedup and their handling ofcustomer reports of the problem led to a whole mess of other problems.So from t he outside looking in, it seems that many processes inherent to Toyota had room for good. Although there are many different byplay sections of Toyota with their own respective problems such as customer service, public relations, manufacturing, the problem I would like analyze and bid improvement on is inherent communication process between management and foreign employees and how the breakdown in this process affected some of the business decisions make by Toyotas upper management.As Toyota grew into a global powerhouse in the auto industry, the organizational structure that emerged was a modify design that put reveal decision-making in the hands of executives in Japan Some believed that Toyotas structure in the U.S. ultimately impaired its ability to prevent the safety problems before they reached the crisis (Greto, Schotter Teagarden, 2010, pg. 7-8). A musical none tool or method utilise to help with the identification and prioritization of the potential causes of qual ity problems in a process is cause-and-effect analysis.In a way, this is a opponent engineering method used to identify the elements of a specific quality problem and to identify the causes so that it can be corrected. The problem wasnt the unintended acceleration of certain vehicles the problem was the internal management decision-making that impacted the engineering of those vehicles which created the engineering problem.For some background information, the defining and invention philosophy of Toyota, the Toyota Way, has been around for a farseeing time but it wasnt until the late 1980s in which they began production of their vehicles in the U.S. Specific all toldy the problem of ideas from U.S.-based employees has been handsomely ignored for almost 20 years when it comes to advert engineering or financial-based decisions. Despite the global sales volume gain, Toyota reported revenues of US $211 meg for 2009, a decrease of 19% for the previous year (Greto, Schotter Teagard en, 2010, pg. 2). blush though Toyota has been making large profits throughout the past 20 years, they experienced a decrease in 2009 and part of this was related to the ambitious initiatives and business decisions made by Toyotas upper management.Japan is notoriously consensus oriented, and companies gravel a strong tendency to mediate differences among individuals rather than accentuate them (Porter, 1996, pg. 63). Japanese civilization and Toyotas centralized decision-making structure made it difficult for U.S. based employees to offer ideas, suggestions for improvements, or to elevate critical problems to upper management in Japan. Toyotas upper management, in their minds, let the U.S. employees do what they do best, which is supposedly marketing and selling. The process used by Toyota to communicate foreign employees ideas to upper management was hear, but not listened to. Even the process of internal communication between management had its breakdowns because of the percept ion by family-oriented four-in-hands of nonfamily managers in that nonfamily members didnt have such thoughts as safety and quality in the forefront of their minds. Overall, the communication process seemed to be that ideas were submitted from employees, whether by Japanese or foreign employees, to management and ideas were reviewed and pushed up the management chain when it was appropriate.However, ideas that might have some bearing on engineering, manufacturing or financing were largely ignored when the source of the ideas were from U.S.-based employees and this violated the Toyota Way. To add to the complexity, the process for communicating ideas became more convoluted depending on the audience, nonfamily or family-based managers. To sum this up into a problem statement Toyota has violated their founding philosophy of employee empowerment, especially for non-Japanese employees, and continues to make important business decisions without any regard to concerns or ideas from foreig n employees when appropriate. Employees may have ideas that could be used in the decision-making process to achieve fall apart quality solutions. Toyota needs a better mechanism or improvement to this internal communication process to hoodwink the knowledge and ideas of all employees and to share these ideas across the organization. All in all, its to improve the internal communication process between employees and management in order to support the idea of continuous improvement and quality.CONTEXT OF SELECTED PROCESS FOR IMPROVEMENTThe _Toyota Way_ mandates planning for the long term highlighting problemsinstead of hiding them back up team break down with colleagues and suppliers and, perhaps most importantly, instilling a self-critical finish that fosters continuous and unrelenting improvement (Greto, Schotter Teagarden, 2010, pg. 3). Two cores ideas from the statement above are the idea of team work and most importantly employee empowerment. These two values are what made Toyota into a palmy global corporation during their fast rise in the 1980s. Employees were encouraged to offer ideas for improvement for any process within the organization and this helped with continuing the idea of continuous improvement. An important part of making business decisions is having real time and critical information.The selected process for improvement improving the communication of ideas and concerns and the sharing of foreign employees ideas to Toyotas Japanese management team needs to be addressed immediately. The process selected for improvement is the process used to capture the ideas of all employees, U.S.-based included, and to have these ideas be properly represented and presented to management for review in real-time. You know the joke that every swear branch has a president well, every Toyota facility has a president, and one cant tell another what to do (Greto, Schotter Teagarden, 2010, pg. 8). This statement touches the surface of why the internal mana gement communication process needs improvement at Toyota. The way the process is currently being represented in Toyotas organization is a write out violation of their founding philosophy.During the 2000s, Toyota pushed for a lot of initiatives that in hindsight were either short-term profit driven or too ambitious. For example, despite the savings of more than US $10 billion over the six years since CC21s inception, Watanabe set out to achieve even more cost savings through the new VI (Value Innovation) strategy (Greto, Schotter Teagarden, 2010, pg. 5). This was a business decision made to further drive up profits despite the respectable amount of savings already made financially.If the knowledge, ideas and concerns of employees were properly captured and communicated to management, it could have prevented some of the poor business decision-making made and the impact of these decisions on engineering and manufacturing. Two impacts of the poor decision-making was the decision to be come leaner with the manufacturing process andoverstretching existing resources in trying to supplant GM as number on in the automobile industry. Toyotas has employees in many different markets who most credibly had concerns regarding these decisions or ideas on how to improve the ideas and _communicated_ these ideas but these ideas werent being heard in time or heard at all by management.To put this all into context, the process for communicating ideas and concerns internally is impacted by the culture and internal structure of Toyota. These are both tough things to change but the process used to capture and represent ideas to management is something easy to improve.IMPLICATIONS OF THE PROCESSIf the current internal communication process continues as is, there will continue to be a breakdown in the communication of potentially important ideas and concerns from employees to management. If employees feel as if their input isnt listened to or even heard, they will become apathetic or not even bother trying to communicate important ideas or concerns. As a go forth, this can lead to the cycle of poor business decisions being made resulting in more damage to the company. Even worse, this will continue to cause Toyota to stray out from the core values of the Toyota Way that made them a successful global corporation.Already what has happened as a result of the ignoring of ideas and making business decisions with only the goal of short-term profits in mind is that Toyota during the oil sludge crisis had to pay millions of dollars as a result of class action lawsuits and took a hit to their business image. Fast forward to the catalyst crisis, Toyota experienced losing $2 billion dollars during the recall, had to pay a $16.4 million dollar civil penalty under U.S. law, experienced a customer relations nightmare and even had some of their auto models dropped from Consumer Reports. The dollar amount lost due to the alienation of customers, lack of accountability at first by Toyota, and corporate reputation and image hit is immeasurable.Implementing some mechanism to improve the communication process betweenemployees and management and even management can be improved with the use of something such as a knowledge management system. Effective knowledge management tools can help firms reduce internal costs of maintaining electronic filing systems and reduce the administrative set down of locating documents.Second, just as efficiency can improve profitability, leverage can have the same effect where knowledge transfer enhances the quality of work performance, and therefore, its value. In this context, leverage is the ability to delegate work to the most cost-effective resource. The transfer of knowledge is, in fact, the essence of knowledge management (Martin, 2002, pg. 1). Although it is a large internal expense, the benefits of a KM system would have a great effect on the general business results and business relationships of Toyota with its emp loyees, management and even their write out chain.POTENTIAL OUTCOMES OF IMPROVING THE PROCESSImproving the current internal communication process of ideas and concern helps to improve employee relations between management and their reports. It helps to re-establish a culture of knowledge sharing and representing that captured knowledge in such a way that it can help to improve the business decision-making by upper management. Any important business decisions made by upper management have a direct impact on the shareholders. So any improvement in the process that results in better business decisions being made will have a direct positive impact for the shareholders.The current decision-making and straying away from the founding principles of the Toyota Way has damaged the company and continuing down this path will only make the future worse for Toyota. So having an internal mechanism to capture ideas and improve communication such as a KM system can only improve the situation. Emplo yees would feel like their ideas are being heard and will continue to offer suggestions for continual improvement.An improvement in communication can help to break down the false perceptions that family-oriented managers have of nonfamily managers. For example, a family-based manager might come across an idea from an unexpected source, a nonfamily manager, and come to respect that person for their knowledge. In away, this could help to improve the Japanese culture way of making decisions internally.Toyota is almost in the top of their market, so they are their own worst enemy when it comes to being competitive. So an improvement in their internal decision-making around all important financial, engineering and manufacturing decisions will only help to sustain and further their current competitive edge. Sometimes an organization has to make a large internal expense in order to position themselves differently from their competitors. Strategic positioning means performing _different_ ac tivities from rivals or performing similar activities in _different_ ways (Porter, 1996, pg. 62). So collecting ideas internally and using them to make better business decisions will help Toyota to strategically position themselves even further away from their competition.SUMMARYOverall, Toyota is its own worst enemy with the current decision-making process they have in place internally. Even though the centralized decision-making structure is what Toyota currently has in place, the decision-making needs to take into account employee input, whether foreign or not. Employee input has been a cornerstone of the Toyota Way and Toyota has strayed from this founding principle. The implications of continuing down this path will result in more crises which in turn results in loss business, damaged business reputation, lawsuits and losing the competitive edge. Improving this process will result in better employee relations establish a knowledge sharing culture which is needed for an environm ent that is striving for continual improvement and better business decisions being made.REFERENCESGreto, M., Schotter, A., Teagarden, M. (2010). Toyota The accelerator crisis. Thunderbird School of Global Management.Martin, K. (2002). Features Show Me the Money Measuring the Return on Knowledge Management. LLRX. Retrieved from http//www.llrx.com/features/kmroi.htmPorter, M. E. (1996). What is strategy? _Harvard Business Review, 74_(6), 61-78.Russell, R.S., Taylor, B.W. (2011). _Operations management Creating value along the supply chain_ (7th ed.)_._ Hoboken, NJ John Wiley Sons. ISBN 9780470525906