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Toyota is Japan's top automaker that has experienced global sales growth over the past two decades. A key issue is designing its global production and distribution network. Toyota opens factories in each market it serves, and must decide each factory's production capabilities, which impacts the desired distribution system. Before 1996, Toyota used local specialized factories, but after a financial crisis it redesigned plants able to export to strong markets when local markets weaken, calling this "global complementation."

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Akash Kumar
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62 views1 page

15

Toyota is Japan's top automaker that has experienced global sales growth over the past two decades. A key issue is designing its global production and distribution network. Toyota opens factories in each market it serves, and must decide each factory's production capabilities, which impacts the desired distribution system. Before 1996, Toyota used local specialized factories, but after a financial crisis it redesigned plants able to export to strong markets when local markets weaken, calling this "global complementation."

Uploaded by

Akash Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Toyota: A Global Auto Manufacturer Toyota Motor Corporation is Japan’s top auto manufacturer

and has experienced significant growth in global sales over the past two decades. A key issue facing
Toyota is the design of its global production and distribution network. Part of Toyota’s global strategy is
to open factories in every market it serves. Toyota must decide what the production capability of each
of the factories will be, as this has a significant impact on the desired distribution system. At one
extreme, each plant can be equipped only for local production. At the other extreme, each plant is
capable of supplying every market. Before 1996, Toyota used specialized local factories for each market.
After the Asian financial crisis in 1996–97, Toyota redesigned its plants so it could also export to markets
that remain strong when the local market weakens. Toyota calls this strategy “global complementation.”

Whether to be global or local is also an issue for Toyota’s parts plants and product design.

Should parts plants be built for local production or should there be a few parts plants
globally that supply multiple assembly plants? Toyota has worked hard to increase commonality in
parts used around the globe. Although this has helped the company lower costs and improve parts
availability, common parts caused significant difficulty when one of the parts had to be recalled. In 2009,
Toyota had to recall about 12 million cars using common parts across North America, Europe, and Asia,
causing significant damage to the brand as well as to the financesAmazon sells books, music, and many
other items over the Internet and is one of the pioneers of online consumer sales. Amazon, based
in Seattle, started by filling all orders using books purchased from a distributor in response to
customer orders. As it grew, the company added warehouses, allowing it to react more quickly to
customer orders. In 2013, Amazon had about 40 warehouses in the United States and another
40 in the rest of the world. It uses the U.S. Postal Service and other package carriers,
such as UPS and FedEx, to send products to customers. Outbound shipping-related costs at
Amazon in 2012 were over $5 billion. Following the introduction of the Kindle, Amazon has worked hard
to increase sales of

digital books. The company has also added a significant amount of audio and video content for sale in
digital form.

Amazon has continued to expand the set of products that it sells online. Besides books and

music, Amazon has added many product categories such as toys, apparel, electronics, jewelry, and
shoes. In 2009, one of its largest acquisitions was Zappos, a leader in online shoe sales. This acquisition
added a great deal of product variety: According to the Amazon annual report, this required creating
121,000 product descriptions and uploading more than 2.2 million images to the website. In 2010,
another interesting acquisition by Amazon was diapers.com. Unlike Zappos, this acquisition
added little

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