Toyota Strategy Implementation

Business Management

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PART: ONE

1. Toyota Strategy Implementation Process:

Strategy implementation is the actual conversion of strategy into action to attain strategic goals of an organisation. It can be defined as the way in which a business concern develops, utilizes its control systems, and culture to pursue the strategies to have competitive advantage and better performance over its rivals.

Toyota is well recognised brand in producing quality vehicles at competitive prices. This target is attained due to its successful strategy implementation process that includes the following issues:

Organisation Structure Change: The best way of implementing a strategy is to have clearly defined authority, and free flow of information with employees. A Clearly well defined atmosphere of Toyota aways helps the company to introduce changes easily as are proposed by its employees. Moreover the culture of Toyota connects employees to the organization’s mission and that makes them feel comfortable.

Human resource management: The Company is having right combination of people at the right place with required competencies and skills to support the plan. Company emphasised on the strategy of continuous improvement of workforce by empowering and encouraging them to develop unique ways of doing things.

Allocation of resources: The Company is committed to have sufficient funds and enough time to support implementation of strategies. So it follows JIT as well as dealing with defects only when they arise. Company never want to waste its time and money in undesired activities.

Information and decision process: Toyota relies on its workforce and gives them enough information to keep them align with its goals and objectives. The company want them to do things differently and want them never to be satisfied.

Leadership: The Company is run by efficient team of leaders who are always there to motivate the employees to make a move.

2. Market Segmentation of Toyota

Toyota is using Adjacent Segment to increase its market share and adds to its customer’s base. The main strategy of Toyota is to beat its customers by providing high quality vehicles at competitive prices.

Currently Toyota is using following market segmentation: To meet the need of different customers:

Demographic Segmentation: In this segment Toyota targeted the family size with Upper Middle High Income group and introduced Land Cruiser, Parado, Camry etc. All these cars are basically designed for people having both the buying power in terms of money as well as the will power to purchase cars. (Graeme-Drummond-John-Ensor-Ruth-Ashford-Strategic-Marketing-Third-Edition-Planning-and-Control-2008 (Ashford, 2008).

Psychographic Segmentation: Under this segmentation, Toyota has targeted people of the high class with high income having sporty attitude, so the company has introduced Altis Sport model and Toyota Fortuner to carter their needs.

3. Perceptual mapping process of Toyota

Toyota is having positive image in form of its brand and passenger safety even if it is producing cars with higher prices in comparison to its competitors. Mapping of Toyota is as follows:

4. Financial and accounting issues:

The strategy implementation of Toyota addresses the following issues in relation to finance and accounting:

* Acquiring Required capital: The first financial issue addressed was the requirement of capital to implement strategy successfully and the review of various sources like short-term debt, long-term debt, preferred stock, or common stock to meet the need of finance.

* The next issue is to buy or lease the fixed assets required for the implementation.

* Preparation of financial budgets

* Following Just in Time to reduce the cost of transferring materials from one place to another.

* Evaluating the worth of a business: In terms of dividend payout ratio and profitability of the business.

5. Organisational Changes Made by Toyota:

The main objective of strategy of Toyota is to get an upper hand in the market by providing high quality vehicles at competitive prices. To attain this objective of being unique it has introduced different changes. Following is the list of few changes introduced by Toyota to accomplish its objective:

* Company emphasised on the strategy to deal with the defects only when they arise. It really helped the company in saving its time, resources and efforts.

* The other strategy of Toyota is to empower its workers to hold the production of defective items which helps the company in maintaining its world class quality.

* Another strategy adopted by Toyota is to encourage and motivate its employees to bring new ideas irrespective of their position.

* The company started making use of various slogans to motivate its employees. These slogans help the company to create a competitive environment at the workplace.

* The strategy of using Just in Time for components also helped the company to have a check on its cost by purchasing the component as and when required.

PART: TWO

1. Strategic decision Making Process of Chrysler and Proposed Changes

Doug Betts suggested changes in the Chrysler to bring it out of the crisis it was facing due to the policies of its autocratic style leadership used by the authorities. So the strategic decisions were taken to bring changes as proposed by Betts:

1. To forgo the culture of blaming others for failure by framing cross cultural teams.

2. Team empowerments strategy to to create a fully engaged workforce and to solve the problem within the department rather than passing it on formally to higher authorities for solution which is quite time taking.

3. Overcoming the fear of losing jobs among employees to treat employees as valued partners.

4. Divide and rule policy of the management should be replaced by policy of an esprit de corps that energizes members.

5. The another strategy is to motivate employees to discuss and inspire them to find the solution of the