Toyota Motor Manufacturing and its Problems Essay

Toyota Motor Manufacturing and its Problems - Essay Example In terms of purchasing, the seat made up the highest expenses of all purchased parts. The fabric made up almost half of its $740 cost (Mishina & Takeda, 2015). As a result, the company wishes to find out the immediate actions that should be taken so as to address the Camry seat problem. The company also wishes to examine whether the current method of handling seat defects that are the TMM method has been in line with the Toyota Production System’s philosophy. When the Toyota Motor Manufacturing was established in 1988 in Georgetown, the plant had a sole objective of producing 200,000 Camry seats that would replace the bulk of similar model imports from Japan. Toyota has an objective of providing cheaper and better cars for more people meaning that the company has to produce cars that meet the wide range of customer preferences with minimal flaws. The company also has to provide vehicles with perfect timing and at an affordable price. As Toyota was forced to cut its cost dramatically without large economies of scale compared to the American firms, the company needed a new source of economies in order to satisfy its customers with a wide variety, timeliness and quality at a reasonable price (Mishina &Takeda, 2015). The Toyota Production system, therefore, evolved as an answer to this challenge through eliminating wastes. The Toyota Motor Manufacturing sole supplier for seats was the Kentucky Framed Seat. As the cars went down the TMM’s assembly line, the seat assembly pieces in KFS had to do the same with the matching pieces emerging at one end fully inspected. A truckload of the fifty-eight seats would then arrive at TMM after thirty minutes. Upon reaching TMM, the seats would be offloaded to the staging line that was not big enough to accommodate the whole truckload. The seats, therefore, had to have to wait in the specific line until a space in the overhead conveyor. The conveyor line is  synchronized with the assembly line and runs above a panel of steel mesh that protects the cars and people below. The seats travel a quarter of a kilometer to the Final 1 which has the rear seat loading workstation.