Total Quality Management and Business Excellence: The Best Practices at Toyota Motor Corporation
Author:Sorin-George Toma and Shinji Naruo
JEL:M1, M19
DOI:
Keywords:total quality management, business excellence, best practices, Toyota
Production System, Toyota Motor Corporation
Abstract:
Today’s rough competition at a global level in all spheres of activity imposes companies
worldwide to make sustained efforts in order to improve their products, services and
processes. The automotive industry has always provided valuable examples of companies
that achieved business excellence by putting quality at the core of their production system
such as Toyota Motor Corporation. It has continuously designed, implemented and
developed the Toyota Production System that influenced the emergence of the business
excellence models. The paper aims to highlight the relationship between the concepts of
total quality management and business excellence, and to identify and analyze the best
practices related to them at Toyota Motor Corporation, a leader of automotive industry. The
information obtained through the direct and personal observation method and from multiple
secondary sources of data was collected, processed and analyzed in order to achieve the
objectives of the paper. The main results show that the best practices of Toyota Motor
Corporation related to total quality management and business excellence derive from the
Toyota Production System and these practices are to be found in the attributes of business
excellence.