Toyota holds 1st global committee meeting in Japan to shore up quality control
- Source: Xinhua
- [16:16 March 30 2010]
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Following the world's largest car maker's massive global recalls, Toyota Motor Corporation on Tuesday held its first meeting of a global committee formed to deepen communication between the Japanese head office and its many regional operations all over the world.
"We all came away from the meeting with a strong sense of solidarity in tackling our common goal of raising quality from the customer standpoint," Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at a news conference at the company's headquarters in Toyota, Aichi Prefecture, at the center of Japan's main honshu island.
"We will be doing everything possible to regain consumer confidence."
Toyoda added that the content of the committee meeting will be reviewed by a team of outside experts including former US Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater.
The Special Committee for Global Quality, headed by Toyota President Akio Toyoda, comprises quality chiefs from regions including North America, Europe, China, Asia and Oceania, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America and the creation of such a committee is a move by Toyota to provide its regional offices with more autonomy to act swiftly upon localized consumer complaints.
"We have full involvement of any safety initiatives going forward," Steve St. Angelo, executive vice president of Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America Inc. and chief quality officer of North America, told reporters in Aichi.
Toyota was harshly criticized for its sluggish response to complaints that led to the eventual recall of over 8 million vehicles worldwide including its best-selling Camry, Corolla and Prius models over problems connected to accelerator pedals, brakes and loose floor mats.
The new committee, however, is now charged with overseeing and reviewing all of Toyota's processes, including vehicle design, production and sales, in a bid to avoid the lapses in judgment that led to a number of fatalities that have been attributed to the automaker.
Along with regional quality chiefs sharing information on local consumer complaints to ensure such a preventable disaster is avoided in the future, it is hoped that the move will double-up as a method of more effective customer research and, as Toyoda commented, the eventual regaining of the public's trust and wider profit margins for the automaker.
"The volume in sales will definitely increase if we can genuinely recover trust in the quality of our vehicles," Toyoda said. "If volume returns, that will in effect have a positive impact on our profitability," Toyoda told local reporters.
Toyota on Tuesday, for the first time in the automaker's history, opened its doors to the media and offered a tour of its quality control facility, including its vehicle checking system that evaluates vehicles' performance in different climates and weather conditions.
Toyoda came under fire for being conspicuously absent and unavailable to the media in the early stages of Toyota's recall crises and a more transparent Toyota is one of the firm's ways of reconciling their shortcomings.
At Tuesday's meeting the committee members also agreed to set up new training centers in Japan, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and China by July, as a way of ushering in a new breed of quality control experts to a company traditionally known for harboring its authority in Japan.
