Operations Management: Quality Management in Toyota's Supply Chain

This report provides a detailed analysis of quality management within Toyota's car manufacturing supply chain. It begins with an introduction to the importance of quality management in modern business, emphasizing its role in supply chain success. The report then focuses on Toyota, examining its quality management practices and their impact on the supply chain. A process map of Toyota's supply chain is presented to illustrate the various stages involved, followed by a recommended process map for improved operations. The analysis section delves into the operation, highlighting the significance of KPIs, cross-functional teams, and bottleneck identification. The evaluation section compares Toyota's current practices with the recommended process, focusing on performance control. Finally, the report concludes with a summary of findings and recommendations for enhancing quality management in Toyota's supply chain, ensuring customer satisfaction and business success. The report utilizes various tools and theories to evaluate the existing processes and suggest improvements. The document is available on Desklib, a platform providing students with AI-powered study tools.

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Operations Management
Topic: The effect of Quality management on Supply Chain
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................2
Toyota Car Manufacturing Quality management and its effects of Supply Chain................2
Process Map for Toyota Car Supply Chain............................................................................4
Recommended Process map of the operation........................................................................5
Analysis of the operation.......................................................................................................6
Evaluation of the operation....................................................................................................9
Evaluation of the theory as per the tools used......................................................................10
Conclusion................................................................................................................................11
References................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
In the world of business, the competition has raised at such a level that rather than two
organizations in competition, the organizations now compete about the supply chains as well.
The organizations have an urge to develop the best quality products and services during their
project progression for providing the customers (Vanichchinchai 2019). For this, they need to
ensure the seamless rendition of every project phase, ensuring the best possible quality of
each one of them. This is why, every organization needs to have the understanding of
maintaining the best possible quality of products and services throughout the project
progression. Maintaining the product quality is as important for every phase as it is for the
management of the supply chain (Bastas and Liyanage 2018). It forms the act of overseeing
any project and activities required for a specific task. At the same time, it would prepare the
maintenance of the standardized level of excellence for the supply chain management by
determining all the quality policies that the organization abides by and assuring the checking
of quality throughout the phases of the project. This is why, this report would be prepared so
that the quality management in supply chain of Toyota Car Manufacturing and its progression
in an organization handling the processes would be described by comparing it with an ideal
quality management in supply chain situation to understand the drawbacks and suggest an
ideal process map. The evaluation and analysis of the operation for maintaining the quality
management of supply chains would be described with the utility of tools prepared for this
purpose.
Toyota Car Manufacturing Quality management and its effects of Supply Chain
Toyota Car Manufacturing organization have their primary focus on reaching the
goals of having the best quality cars manufactured by the organization through several
restricted and organized processes. This ensures that the business organizations are reaching

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towards their success in the long run by providing the customers with the best possible car
products (Prajogo, Oke and Olhager 2016). On the other hand, the business organization also
have several policies set up for the maintenance of qualities for the products or services that
they have. This ensures that Toyota lives up to the expectations of the customers for
providing the manufactured cars and products as well. For a business engaging in a proper
development of a supply chain, it needs to be ensured that the seamless integration of the
supply chain management is conveyed so that the growth and development of the business
functions are also identified along with the success determination for the business (Thai and
Jie 2018). The proper processing of the operations for a supply chain as standardized by the
business organization would set the standardized policy about how the project would progress
through the supply chain management procedure, maintaining the proper balance between the
quality of the project and the insurance of the product or service quality throughout all the
phases of the supply chain.
The next section would have a representation of the supply chain that is managed in
Toyota car manufacturing through all the levels till the car is presented in the market.

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Process Map for Toyota Car Supply Chain
Figure 1: Toyota’s Supply Chain Management
(Source: Toyota.com 2019)
The above diagram is generated to understand the process map of the supply chain in
Toyota and also how it includes the process would follow the quality analysis at every stage
of the supply chain progression to understand the product quality maintenance (Tan 2016).
The analysis of the supply chain needs to ensure that the beginning of the product analysis
before it is traversed by the supply chain has the product checked to ensure the quality of the

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product. At the same time, the quality checking would analyse the key performance
indicators at the beginning of the project and at the same time, take a check on each of these
KPIs to make sure that each and every one of them are providing the best quality solutions to
the product throughout the supply chain. Thus, it needs to be mentioned that the quality
assurance is extremely important in case of a supply chain management for Toyota which it
was missing out on (Quang et al. 2016). This ensures that mapping of the processes
throughout the entire supply chain is maintained, before the actual project continues to
deliver through the supply chain the quality checking at every process step (Machado et al.
2016). It makes sure that the project takes on necessary steps to continue with the project and
at the same time has to ensure that the quality of the product passing through the entire
supply chain maintains the product and service quality before it is passed on to the customers.
The analysis would extend to the different phases continuing the supply chain till it
reaches the end phase including the intermediate phases like measuring the process
performance, analysing the process performance, improving the control process and the
control of the process performance.
Analysis of the operation
The analysis of the business operation through the supply chain management would
help in delivering the manufactured product to the customers by Toyota, but at the same time
would make sure that any issues during the project would be solved as early as possible and
all the team members who would be associated with the project would ensure the quality of
the product (Soares, Soltani and Liao 2019). The product quality would only be kept intact, if
the quality of each project phase through the supply chain maintains the quality of the project.
As per the process maps suggests, the phases as described in the process map would ensure
the effect of quality management on the supply chain. This would make sure that the team in
responsibility of the supply chain management would form a cross functional effort to ensure

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that the task allocated to the team to handle the supply chain prioritizes their procedures
accordingly (Hu, Braziotis and Tan 2017). The application of the mapping initiative by the
team in these cases, usually begins with the identification of the KPIs. The KPIs help in
determining the key relationship points and then are associated with several areas of
implementation. These mostly are, engaging the supplier or distributor, developing the
product and services, testing the product and services, supporting the promotion based
activities and the provision of the limited timed offers, and supporting all the changes that
might be brought at each of the stages when in need (Zhang et al. 2019). The understanding
based on every stage of the connecting point needs understanding by the team ensuring the
supply chain activities. The basis of the feasible working of this particular management
process would be done with the help of immensely well-built interactive procedure. That is,
they need to have a well-planned communication set for feasible sharing of information
between each other (Zhao, Hu and Wang 2015). Finally, the project team also has to build up
a favourable collaboration for the cross functional team so that the entire team can work
accordingly and help in reducing the process mapping such that, they would not resist the
probability of changes at any stage of the supply chain progression.
The next stage would ensure the mapping of the entire supply chain in such a way that
the high level mapping would ensure the major linkages between the supply chain and the
typical areas of potential bottlenecks (Sharma and Modgil 2015). All the linkages between
the customers and suppliers would be identified and then the supply chain management team
would ensure how the serving of the phases would be done with the involvement of the team.
The understanding would help in defining the priorities and then understand the grounds
under which the assembling of the cross-functional team manages (Attia 2016). This phase
also begins the ideation of the probable bottlenecks that might occur due to the progression of
the supply chain. In this case, the team has to be prepared for any changes that might occur in

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the planned process, that would help in identifying the proper ways of clearing the bottle
necks that might occur. The team would be prepared to clear all the bottlenecks and at the
same time would be planning the checking of the quality for the product and services as well.
Being able to identify the probable bottlenecks in the is extremely important for the supply
chain team so that the team effort can prevent the occurrences of delays in the project or
further dealing with the additional resource problems (Usman and Putri 2018). The
insufficient quality from the end of the supply chain contributes in creating a bottleneck
where the further hampering of the quality would be seen through the supply chain. This
might also give rise to the potentiality of a further conflict generation would be elevated.
These areas are to represent the quality assurance of the products and services through the
supply chain and this is why, the return on the investment might be hampered (Fernandes et
al. 2017). The process map represents that the realising the potential synergies of the team
members ensures the related savings along the supply chain. Every stage of this process map
ensures how the different phases of the supply chain management needs quality checking
before the product or the services reaches its final stage. The identification of the potential
bottleneck through this stage makes the team members understand the capacity of the
resources that the organization has and how these resources can be utilized for handling the
probable changes to clear out the potential bottlenecks through the supply chain.
This is one of the most important phase that the quality assurance in a supply chain
has to go through and this is provided by the mapping of the supply chain process. This
enables the identification of the process changes such that the team can decide on the
implementation of the changes throughout the progression of the supply chain. The periodical
weekly reviews of the business reports by the project managers are part of the process where
the requirement of process changes would be identified easily (Hu and Zhao 2018). This
would also provide the base of the analysis for the stages in the process. When the reports

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show that the supply chain has been providing the appropriate results as expectations, there
would not be any requirement for the allocation of the changes required for the supply chain.
On the other hand, if it is found that the expectations are not met, then these reports would
provide the allocation of the changes that would be required for the team to ensure that the
goal is reached without making the further involvement of expenditures done for schedule,
budget or resources (Borodin et al. 2016). Thus, making the process map for the supply chain
management ensuring proper quality of the products and services handles both the product
quality and the efficiency of the supply chain management team to provide the customers
with the best possible solutions.
Evaluation of the operation
Comparing both the situations where Toyota used to handle supply chain management
and the recommended process map of the supply chain management ensuring the quality, the
following evaluation would be based on the control process of the performance phase. The
last phase, or the controlling of the process performance phase would provide information
about the result of the entire process generation and the further works done as per the analysis
of the operation (Green et al. 2019). Mostly, these should be handled by people in the supply
chain management team where the executives of the project would decide about the
progression of the project. The illustration, in support of the developed process for the
management of supply chain helps in understanding how the project would continue to work
with if there are several tools applied to ensure the proper working of the sore management of
operations (Kim, Son and Kim 2016). The understanding would be gathered by the sole idea
of understanding the changes and the Total Quality Management or TQM done to the supply
chain.
The evaluation of the operations makes it easier to understand that the quality of the
process is understood by helping the project team understand the requirement of

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understanding the essentiality of enabling the quality product and services and at the same
time ensuring the workflow of the total management of quality (Jayaram 2016). Concept that
has been recommended here is to provide the understanding for the requirement of changes
and ensuring that the changes done to enhance the quality of the product and services make
use of only the available budget and resources (Truong et al. 2017). The suboptimal can be
improved for the same with the inclusion of a proper cause and effect diagram for the same.
Evaluation of the theory as per the tools used
Figure 2: Cause and Effect Diagram of the Supply Chain Analysis with TQM
(Source: Created by the Author)
The TQM tool that has been applied in this particular case has been the Cause and
Effect Diagram or the Fishbone Diagram, which is providing the analysis and the outcome of
the issues found for the supply chain management during the progression of the project.
During this analysis, the primary issues that have been identified was the inclusion of the
total problematic situation of the changes required in between the process (Witt 2016). The
identification of the problematic situation was required to understand what are the issues that
are either causing delays to the supply chain or has been causing wastage of resources. Both

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these would ultimately result in the increase of the allocated budget. This is why, these
understandings would bring about the required process controls so that no such depiction of
the process changes would affect the budget or schedule (Sinha, Garg and Dhall 2016). The
executives are to make the decisions for the changes, whereas the people in the supply chain
management team would ensure how the process would be carried out for mitigating the
issues, handling the changes, allocating the appropriate available resources and at the same
time making sure of the inclusion of budget or schedule would not hamper the initial plans
(Vanichchinchai 2019). This would ensure that the total quality of the product and services
are managed and confirmed throughout the supply chain for providing the customers.
Conclusion
Therefore, in conclusion, it can be said that the organisation of Toyota was analysed
to find out how its supply chain management was performed and based on that a
recommendation was made on how it could have been enhanced so that the quality
management of the supply chain is also maintained. The report thus provides several stages
for a detailed understanding of the supply chain management for Toyota to ensure that the
quality is maintained for the manufactured cars and services at every stage. The operations of
any organization during this phase ensures that the sufficient detailed process analysis is
maintained. It is done as per the process map depicted in the above report. The process map
shows how the critical appraisal of the system management is most likely recommended to be
done and how sufficiently the detailed process map presents the analysis of the operation.
The illustration supports the progression with the tools that help in the analysis of the
operations comparing Toyota’s original process and the recommended process. The module
helps in understanding the help of quality control and what can be depicted about the robust
improvement of the original sprocess. The Total Quality Management or TQM is
recommended as a solution to understand the use of resources, the probable understanding of

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the recommendations and also staying within the budget and schedule before the changes are
made throughout the whole supply chain.