The king of lean manufacturing and perennial standout in quality surveys has slipped off its perch.
No one should have to tell Toyota that it needs to get back on course, especially not after this week’s developments. The company has recalled 3.8 million vehicles to replace gas pedals that could stick and imperil passengers. Affected models include Camrys, Tacoma and Tundra pickups, Avalons, the Prius, and various Lexus sedans. For now, dealers can execute a workaround to fix the pedals, according to a New York Times article, but the replacement pedals won’t be available for installation until April.
The company is also recalling 110,000 Tundras because rust can compromise the spare-tire mount on the underside of the truck.
This is the price of poor quality. It includes parts replacement and the associated labor costs, of course, but also lawsuits and loss of brand equity. And the bad news isn’t confined to a thankless Thanksgiving week for Toyota. A recent survey by consumer research firm Strategic Vision found that competitors have ousted Toyota from the top spots in various categories of the researcher’s Total Quality Index. Calculated from data collected from more than 20,000 buyers who bought 2008 and 2009 models between September and December of 2008, the index crowned Volkswagen and Ford, once a quality-challenged also-ran, leaders of such categories as small and mid-sized cars. Toyota ranked first in just two of the 17 categories.
Collectively, these developments serve as a harsh reminder that in an industry down on its luck, the leader is not the company that gets its product out the door fastest, but the one who gets it out the door in impeccable condition, fostering brand loyalty and future sales. In that respect, Toyota may need to get back in touch with its roots.
3 Comments
The reality of “lean” has finally hit home: because of an unplanned quality issue, Toyota cannot issue the “new” gas pedals until April, according to the article. Well hooray for no inventory of anything! And hooray for the glory of the lean manufacturing wait times which makes every part order delayed by months. Lean is too often touted in buzz-word filled managerial meetings as the great panacea for all manufacturing issues. In many cases it has been applied against all common sense and stupidity results. Any manufacturing mentality that makes it impossible for me to order a mass-produced gas pedal and get delivery in a reasonable time is unreasonable.
I recently received my bachelors and masters in a manufacturing program that is quality- oriented and the professors frequently mentioned Toyota as an exemplar of quality. However, my experience with a Toyota product was extremely dissapointing. I purchased a 1991 Camry that was 13 years old with about 100,000 miles on it. Everything I had heard and read about the Camrys indicated I should be able to get 200,000-300,000 miles if it was in good shape when I got it and I continued to take good care of it. It appeared to be well cared for when I purchased it and I did take very good care of it. However, in my 35 years of owning and driving cars, I have never experienced such poor vehicle quality. I found myself replacing not only an unbelievable amount of parts on the car, but some of the repairs were repeats of previous repairs I had made that should have normally lasted many years between failure. I figured it up once, and the average cost of the parts over the time I owned the vehicle was more that what I would have paid for a monthly car payment if I hadn’t paid cash for the car. As a former GM technician, I am aware of how to properly care for a vehicle, and as an avid car lover of all brandsI try to purchase different makes and models of vehicles to see how I like them so as not to be biased toward a particular brand and miss out on something else really great out there in the marketplace. I am a great believer in Lean as a management system, and am writing my dissertation on that very topic, but can see that even a great management system does not necessarily equate to high quality 100% of the time, no matter how famous a company’s reputation is for quality. As far as I am concerned, one Toyota was one too many for me.
I can attest to the loss of quality at Toyota dating to 2003. I have a Sienna with several unacceptable quality problems, some identical ones occured in an earlier Previa.