Toyota Installs Vice President Of Recalls
Toyota currently has only five Vice Presidents. Soon, they’ll have a sixth. According to The Nikkei [sub], Toyota HQ in Japan will install a new VP “in response to the increased workload in dealing with the recent massive global recalls of its vehicles.”
Apparently, Toyota is planning for the long term.
Bertel Schmitt comes back to journalism after taking a 35 year break in advertising and marketing. He ran and owned advertising agencies in Duesseldorf, Germany, and New York City. Volkswagen A.G. was Bertel's most important corporate account. Schmitt's advertising and marketing career touched many corners of the industry with a special focus on automotive products and services. Since 2004, he lives in Japan and China with his wife <a href="http://www.tomokoandbertel.com"> Tomoko </a>. Bertel Schmitt is a founding board member of the <a href="http://www.offshoresuperseries.com"> Offshore Super Series </a>, an American offshore powerboat racing organization. He is co-owner of the racing team Typhoon.
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Something has changed Bertel. It seems to me that everyone in the industry is scared of what a mis-managed quality problem can do to sales and reputation. My impression is that the bar on recalls has been considerably lowered. Which means that OEMs are going to have to get used to far more recall work in the future, as once marginal quality issues affecting the few, are all going to get turned into mass recall campaigns. This is the inevitable result of the media-frenzy and anti-Toyota crusade in the US. Now we are all going to have to be whiter-than-white, rushing out bad fixes and no longer having the discretion to fix on a (sensible) case by case basis. Hard business sense or over-reaction to campaigning, it's hard to tell right now.
This is as least the near-term long term. We will remain in an era of fiscal austerity for some time now... perhaps even as long as a generation or 2. Easy credit is gone, and likely for generations. NOBODY is gonna get away with pushing it again. Carmageddon may pass on... slowly... but single car family-geddon may come back to us, and no-car-gen-x'er-geddon may come to the fore. Unless volumes start rising suddenly and drastically, and soak up some of this overcapacity, these OEM guys have to sqabble over every sale out there. If that means installing a VP in charge of recalls, then so be it. I'd recommend they back way off and engineer their product up front, like Toyota claims they do. Also, I would intuit that the current fleet on the road is the best engineered fleet ever, and will have long life, or at least longer than in the past. Replacement part prices may rise, and used car prices may rise, but new car sales are gonna take a while to get back to 17M here. That's my crystal ball reading.
This is a symptom and result of Toyota emphasizing profits over quality. Because Toyota has grown so rapidly, they have added many employees and suppliers who have not been adequately trained in the techniques of continuous improvment. Recalls can be reduced only by focusing again on training in the methods of continuous improvement. http://www.philosophiesofbusiness.com/blog/2010/03/17/quality/troubles-in-toyota-city-2 Tim Mojonnier