Toyota Feels the Heat from Hyundai

By Jon Miller Published on June 17th, 2006

The Autoblog is always good for some emotional point-counterpoint when it comes to the fates and doings of the automobile manufacturers in the United States. Today’s post titled Toyota to suppliers: don’t sell to Hyundai proves no exception with some spirited back-and-forth.
The gist is that Toyota does not want its suppliers on the island of Kyushu to sell parts it helped develop to Hyundai. What follows the article is a wealth of comments on whether this is fair or not by readers who clearly have an opinion on the issue.
Hyundai stated in April of last year that they intend to catch up and overtake Toyota in terms of quality by 2008. As Toyota plays an ever more aggressive game of offense in building factories and expanding their global operation, they are feeling the heat from Hyundai who is racing to catch up in terms of quality. Toyota is has a challenger, and is playing defense.
No more than two decades ago the quality of Hyunday cars was the butt of jokes. Not so today. Among the automotive parts supplers we work with there is a lot of talk of how the “New Four” automobile manufacturers (Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Hyundai) being more relevant to their future than the Big Three (GM, Ford, Chrysler).
Toyota learned what American manufacturing gurus had to teach them 50 years ago, and after adding a lot to this they developed the Toyota Production System, what we call Lean manufacturing today. Hyundai may be the company best positioned to either learn TPS and advance it, or to force Toyota to evolve their business system to stay on top.

Jon Miller

Jon has dedicated his 25+ year career to the field of kaizen, continuous improvement, and lean management. Jon spent the first eighteen years of his life in Japan, then graduated from McGill University with a bachelor’s in linguistics.

Mike
June 19, 2006 - 7:51 am
Reply

“…emotional point-counterpoint…?” Rather uninformed, poorly-worded, overt displays of ignorance. Really, I’ve seen better dialogue between two junior-high students using instant messenger.
manoj Thomas
July 17, 2006 - 5:21 pm
Reply

First time viewing this site and its pretty interesting :
Have a question –
I am trying to do a LEAN Action Workout for a Collections Call Centre any idea how i would go about working on this.
The Team basically gets input of the accounts they need to call. They would then research the account – 3 things could happen , they either call the customer, reconcile the account or Postpone the call since the customer has asked to be contacted on another day.
For those that need to be called you could have a couple of scenarios – 1) Customer Defers payments 2) Customer Disputes payments 3) Customer Promises to Pay.
Need help how to go about it.
Rgds,
Manoj