Brief Company Overview
Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation, and is considered the world’s largest automaker of automobiles, trucks, buses, robots, and providing financial services. The company adopts a philosophy in terms of its production system, which is named The Toyota Way. Its philosophy in production involves a list of fourteen principles that are implemented in the company, and serve as guides to the operation of the company
Resources
Tangible resources
Financial Resources
Toyota is the largest and the most profitable automobile manufacturer in the world. The company reported annual sales of $202 billion and net profit of $ 2.4 billion in 2010. The company has cash equivalents of $43.3 billion. The huge balance sheet and liquidity allows the company to employ cash easily and also to generate funds from outside.
Organizational Resources
Toyota has developed a powerful ‘dynamic capability’ in the form of consistently practiced ‘Rules-in-Use’ for organizational design, improvement, and adaptation. (Spear, 2011)
The firm effectively overcomes the problems of integrating functional know-how into new product development by the creation of cross-functional product development teams for new product development. This helps to focus on all aspects on product launch simultaneously rather than sequentially and thus shortens the time to market.
Physical Resources
The company has factory all over the world to meet the demands of the local market and exploit the low cost manufacturing at several places. Due to its plants spread all over the world the company is able to synergize the overall demand faced by it and the low costs.
Toyota is a pioneer in flexible manufacturing system (FMS) which enables it to produce a number of models at the same facility at a low cost. FMS allows the firm to respond the fluctuation in the demand of its models more quickly and efficiently.
Technological Resources
Toyota has been able to manage