Toyota quality focus

TOYOTA Australia has ramped up quality and customer satisfaction measures in the wake of Toyota Motor Corporation’s (TMC) highly published global safety recalls affecting 8.5 million vehicles worldwide.

Saying it had drawn a line in the sand on quality, the Australian division of the world’s biggest car-maker has pledged greater resources to its Melbourne-based customer quality engineering group to drive quality to the next level.

As well, it will be linked directly to a new Asia-Oceania regional quality taskforce designed to spearhead reforms to Toyota’s quality systems, including safety issues.

The regional committee is one of six around the globe, all reporting to Toyota’s newly created special committee for global quality headed by TMC president Akio Toyoda.

Toyota Australia senior executive of sales and marketing Dave Buttner said the new regional committee gave Australia more opportunity to be heard.

“Australia’s existing respected voice with Japan is being supplemented with the added strength of a regional voice,” he said.

“It will strengthen global communication and transparency it will spearhead comprehensive improvements to the company’s operations and it will promote quality improvement activities around the world.”

Left: Toyota Australia senior executive director of sales and marketing Dave Buttner. Below: TMC president Akio Toyoda.

Toyota’s Asia-Oceania region – including Australia – will be represented on the global committee by three senior executives – head managing officer Mitsuhiro Sonoda from head office in Japan and two senior vice-presidents of Thailand-based Toyota Motor Asia-Pacific – one from manufacturing and one from sales and marketing.

As well as the regional quality committee, Toyota has established a new regional engineering quality improvement division based in Thailand, to collect market information, including from Australia, for dissemination through Toyota’s research and development divisions.

And Toyota Australia’s customer quality engineering group will be further developed to strengthen this gathering of information relating to any suspected quality problems in Australia.

Its aims include fast response times and improved communication with customers.

The newly-established quality committee will focus on ‘built-in quality’ – quality of the Toyota manufacturing process and parts – and ‘quick action’, which includes early detection, fast response and customer communication.

Also coming under the committee’s umbrella are recalls and other safety-related decisions, the strengthening of information gathering speed, accuracy and response, the timely and accurate disclosure of relevant information to the public, product safety and assurance and human resources issues.

As well, independent adjudicators will sit in on the regional committee’s meetings to ensure Toyota’s safety and quality objectives are always met.

Mr Buttner said another welcome development was TMC's decision to establish ‘customer first’ training centres, including one in the Asia-Oceania region.

"This will provide opportunities to participate in regionally focused development of our people and our skills," he said.

Mr Buttner said Toyota had already changed under the new committee regime, focussing the company’s efforts so as to never leave customers in doubt of its commitment to quality and safety.

“The actual change that I can already see is the absolute change to get this right,” he told GoAuto Media.

“Absolute attitude to ensure that the customer is absolutely centric in every decision Toyota makes relative to their product and declaration and timeliness of that activity – you can palpably sense that from the company.

“We’ve always had a very strong customer focus. It’s just that we’ve had this reinvigoration to make it better than it’s ever been, and make that the next most positive step forward.” Mr Buttner said he believed Toyota Australia had been fortunate not to have been adversely affected by the global recall in terms of falling sales or brand image because of the speed it moved to rectify the ‘brake feel’ issue in the Prius after just two complaints.

“We’ve have a very, very good reputation in terms of our speed to customer issues and in terms of our manufacturing quality it’s been amongst the best in the Toyota world,” he said.

“When we looked at the research at the peak of the public recall, there’s no denying that there had been some diminution of some aspects of consumer sentiment.

“But what we’ve found now, on the back of what we’ve tried to do to communicate with stakeholders speedily and accurately in not having a broad-brushed campaign by dealing with each individual customer with each issue, is that we are back to pre-recall status, and we are very confident that the brand has not been tarnished in every significant manner whatsoever.” To underline the Toyota’s redoubled commitment to customer safety and confidence, as well as its ongoing investment in the Australian operations, the announcement was made at a new $25 million Toyota dealership in West Terrace, Adelaide.

The facilities include highly visible servicing and workshop facilities next to a showroom – a metaphor, one spokesman said, for the new transparency Toyota wants to convey.