Technological Unemployment: A Case Study of Toyota Company

This paper discusses the impact of technological unemployment on Toyota Company. It covers the literature search, scenario development, and conclusion. The paper also highlights the concept of technological unemployment and how it affects the employees of the company.

Running head: Supply Chain 1
Management and Operation Supply Chain

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Contents
Overview......................................................................................................................................................3
Description of Chosen Company..................................................................................................................3
Literature search..........................................................................................................................................3
Scenario development.................................................................................................................................3
Conclusion...................................................................................................................................................3
References...................................................................................................................................................4

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Overview
The major objective of this paper is to disclose the variety of the conceptions and techniques
obtainable to operations managers for the reason of facilitating the effective business decision
making. The Toyota Company will be considered to express growth of the concept of
Technological Unemployment from its commencement until the present day. The scenario will
be developed in the context of the company by taking help of Frey and Osborne’s findings.
About Company
Toyota Motor Corporation was established in 1937 by the Toyoda family and the Headquarter of
the company is situated in Japan. The main focus of the company is to offer paramount quality
and reliable car to clients for the purpose of making them satisfied. The company has achieved
good positions in the automotive industry and it is recognized as developed company (Chart,
Industry and Industry, 2010).
Company is offering number of services and products to the customer by adopting high level of
technology. The major products of the company are Carolla, Yaris, FJ Cruiser, Camry, Sienna,
Masterace, Prius and many more. Apart from this, company is involved in diversifying the business
and it provides variety of services as well (Toyota, 2014).
In the context of the customers, the main customers of the company are those who are fond of
buying new cars. The company offers direct information in relation of the products and services
to the customers. The dealer of the company supports to convey the latest information to the
customers regarding new change within the company.

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Literature
According to Cang, (2017), technology has been developing day by day and the organizations
have become more advanced by adopting latest technology in which the trust of the company
towards robots and advanced machine has increased. It has been found that the technological
unemployment occurs when an employee lose their jobs due to technological advancements
(Campbell-Kelly, 2009). The company has started to switch manpower with technology results
in technological unemployment. The rapidity of technological modernism is enlarging with more
appropriate software expertises troublemaking labour markets by building workers
unemployment. Computerization is no longer controlled to practice manufacturing tasks (Kim,
Kim and Lee, 2017).
The independent driverless cars are being developed by Google which is the illustration of how
labour-intensive tasks in logistics and transport might rapidly be computerized. In the part of “In
Domain after Domain, Computers race ahead”, they highlight how quick affecting these
improvements have been. It has been analyzed that less than 10 years ago, in the lesson of “Why
people still substance”, Lucky and Takim, (2015), stated that issues of imitating human insight,
stating that driving in traffic is not vulnerable to mechanization: “but implementing a left turn
against approaching traffic includes various aspects that is difficult to imaging finding the set of
rules that can imitate a behaviour of driver. It has been found that after six years, in 2010, it has
been announced by Google that it had customized number of Toyota Priuses to be fully self-
directed (Fuei, 2017).
There is a determining study of behaviour by Frey and Osborne in the year 2013. It has been
forecasted throughout this study that around 47% of the 702 investigated occupations in the
United States are expected to face a huge threat of diminished employment rate in next coming

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10-25 years because of the outcome of computerization. It has been elaborated by Frey and
Osborne, (2017), that the improvement in high skills employment can be asserted through
reducing cost of finding out the practice aims by means of computers, which should be more
theoretical in facilities. With respect to Toyota Company, it can be expressed that the company is
more advanced in technology and number of techniques are being used by the company to
manufacture the car. It has been analyzed that various people left job due to involvement of latest
technology in the company and they do not have sufficient knowledge about the latest
technology (Piotrowski and Guyette, 2010).
It has been assessed by Frey’s finding that 47% of current jobs could be replaced by technology
which shows that around one in ten jobs at high risk of automation, which would get the huge
change in the economy. It has been stated by Matsuo, (2015), that computers will thus be
comparatively creative to human labour when a concern can be précis regarding the technique
for growth are experimental and can willingly be assessed. It has been found that the changes in
working conditions, employment and wage polarisation influence the working system of the
company. Machine learning involves Machine Vision, Data Mining and field of Artificial
Intelligence, wherein hard work is openly devoted to the expansion of algorithms that permit
cognitive task to be robotic (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011).It has been analyzed that the
deployment of robots and other technologies is likely to have a vital aspect on the potential
composition of the economy.
Scenario development
Toyota Company offers their products with reasonable rate with best quality by considering the
segments of the population. The vulnerability of jobs in Singapore is mechanization and

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computerization over the upcoming 10 to 15 years which has been found from the initial data in
Frey and Osborne. Toyota Company has innovated hybrid and electric car to people of the world.
In specific, it has been found that approx 25% of employment in Singapore is high risk due to
technology change.. The employees of the company would be unable to re-employ if they lose
their jobs. The company is embracing latest technology by making robots that give clarification
to some of life hardships. Kiroba robot has been introduced by the company that has different
features of human face recognition. In regards to breaking down the upper level of risk category
by age groups in the company, it can be assumed that around half of the total workers are aged in
which it has been found from the study of Ministry of Manpower (MOM) in Singapore that after
losing their jobs, older adults would be accountable to stay unemployed around 11 weeks longer
than those aged between 20 and 29. According to Frey and Osborne’s findings, there is an
enormous significance of common and policy proposition for Singapore that suggests these
workers who are at high level of risk of being exiled by mechanization are also measured as the
threat of being unemployed.
It is necessary for the Toyota change management to keep consideration in the potential plans of
technology because it can bring advantages as well as disadvantages for the company. It has been
found that the production system of the company is different from other companies. They
believe on master production scheduling which is considered as the development procedure. This
procedure is being made by the company to develop the staff, maintaining the record and
controlling the charge and construction of the company in a sophisticated way. A characteristic
Toyota congregation plant is highly incorporated (Stadtler, 2015). The procedure of Toyota
congregation plant expresses how the means of transport runs by Toyota plant. The manufacture
agenda of company is formed once a month from the sales order and predictions. This helps to

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make the production schedule for the purpose of utilizing the sales order to construct the specific
records for each vehicle and allocate an orientation number (Swink, Melnyk, Cooper, Hartley,
2014). According to the Robotics Industries Association, the operating cost of robot is
$0.75/hour while the same performance of human could cost around $15-20 hour to reimburse
(Lucky and Takim, 2015). The main benefit with robots with the company is that they do not
require any kind of pension facilities and health insurance coverage. It elaborated that the
demand of robots in the Toyota Company in coming years will be increased in sinking the cost
of man power

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Conclusion
It can be concluded that the technological unemployment occurs when employees lose their jobs
due to the technological advancements. The selection of Toyota has been considered to elaborate
the concept of the technological unemployment. The finding has suggested that Toyota Company
has number of employees all over the world and bringing change in the management of the
company would not be easy to replace human with machines. The use of latest technology has
increased in Toyota the impact of which can be seen by observing the ratio of employee
turnover.

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References
Brynjolfsson, E. and McAfee, A. 2011. Race against the machine: How the digital revolution is
accelerating innovation, driving productivity, and irreversibly transforming employment and the
economy. Digital Frontier Press Lexington, MA.
Campbell-Kelly, M. 2009. Origin of computing. Scientific American Magazine, 301(3), pp. 62–
69.
Cang, Y., 2017. A Deep Dive into Technological Unemployment: A State-Level Analysis on the
Employment Effect of Technological Innovations. Available [online]
http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/1660. Accessed on 20 June 2018.
Chart, S., Industry, M., and Industry, S. 2010. Toyota Motor Corporation. Available [online]
http://www.toyota-global.com/company/vision_philosophy/. Accessed on 20 June 2018.
Fuei, L.K., 2017. Automation, computerization and future employment in Singapore. Journal of
Southeast Asian Economies (JSEAE), 34(2), pp.388-399.
Kim, Y.J., Kim, K. and Lee, S., 2017. The rise of technological unemployment and its
implications on the future macroeconomic landscape. Futures 87(2), 1-9.
Lucky, B, O. and Takim, S. 2015. Manufacturing defects in the automobile industry, a case study
of the remote causes and effects of Toyota‟s transmission malfunctions in cars, International
Journal of Engineering and Applied Sciences, ISSN: 2394-3661, 2(1) August 2015.

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Matsuo, H. 2015. Implications of the Tohoku earthquake for Toyota׳ s coordination
mechanism: Supply chain disruption of automotive semiconductors. International Journal of
Production Economics, 161, 217-227.
Piotrowski, C., and Guyette, R. 2010. Toyota Recall Crisis: Public Attitudes on Leadership and
Ethics, Organization Development Journal, 28(2), 89-97.
Stadtler, H. 2015. Supply chain management: An overview. In Supply chain management
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Swink, M., Melnyk, S.A., Cooper, M.B. & Hartley, J.L. (2014). Managing operations across the
supply chain (pp. 248-249), New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
Toyota, 2014. 6 innovative projects from the Toyota Motor Corporation. Available [online]
http://blog.toyota.co.uk/6-innovative-projects-from-the-toyota-motor-corporation.
Accessed on 20 June 2018.