Toyota Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is very common topic that affects the business world nowadays. Toyota automobile manufacturer is an international factory operating in different sates all over the world. The corporation’s aim is to operate its business with a focus on vehicle production. It was founded based on market needs of Albania.

While Knowledge Management (KM) is important in any business however, there is no real agreed upon definition. KM is a concept that includes the

Toyota Motor North America does a good job of employing a very diverse working group. Toyota a has a top-down approach where its upper management has a deep commitment to diversity (DiversityInc, n.d). In 2016 they introduced an Ambassador Program which provided end-to-end support for qualified applicants. In addition, they partnered with local and national organizations to connect people and resources.

Toyota advances the United States in motor vehicle production because the country has devised the proper strategies in importing valuable technologies for manufacturing; they have excelled in building the appropriate labor pool; along with skilled management professionals, as they have marketed their products successfully in the home market for Japanese transportation needs.

Toyota’s strength is creating the best cars at lowest cost and developing new concepts and products within shortest timeframe. To accomplish this, they use a quite unorthodox manufacturing system. The management of Toyota is convinced that success is not only achieved by striving to optimal efficiency. It seriously invests in their employees in order to ameliorate their capabilities and therefore as a final result improve the strength and capabilities of the entire company. Ideas are shared horizontally as well as vertically and management constantly stimulates the process. The company sees the employees as the essential key assets of their

"Knowledge management is the set of practices aimed at discovering and harnessing an organization 's intellectual resources. It 's about finding, unlocking, sharing, and altogether capitalizing on the most precious resources of an organization: people 's expertise, skills, wisdom, and relationships. Knowledge managers find these human assets, help people collaborate and learn, help people generate new ideas, and harness those ideas into successful innovations" (Bateman, 2004, p.8-9). One of the most important factors of change in management is the growing need for good, new ideas. Knowledge management is an approach that allows people to produce change. It 's bringing people together and collecting ideas from

Toyota, one of the world’s largest auto manufacturers, has a problem. Their main North American subsidiary, Toyota Motor Sales, is moving. Toyota’s current national headquarters is located in Torrance, California. It was founded and built in 1957, and has resided there since then. However, in April of 2014, they announced that this headquarters would be moving to Plano, Texas.8

Knowledge management systems (KMS) refer to a class of Information systems applied to managing organizational knowledge. That is, they are IT-based systems developed to support and enhance the organizational processes of knowledge creation, storage/retrieval, transfer and application. While not all KM

To define what is Knowledge Management(KM), one should know what is knowledge first. Knowledge is different data and information. A data gives a specific fact; information is a collection of data that has been organized. Knowledge connects the information that has been given and create the context. For instance, “the third day of a week called Tuesday”, this is a data; “Tuesday is one of the weekdays” and “most people work on weekdays” are the information; Knowledge based on the the information, would suggests that “most people work on Tuesday.”

Knowledge is often defined as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a certain subject. There are many taxonomies that specify different kinds of knowledge but most fundamental contrast is between “tacit” and “explicit” knowledge. Tacit knowledge is referred as knowing more than we can say (Polanyi, 1966). Most knowledge is initially tacit and it has been arduously developed over a long time through the method of trial and error. Explicit knowledge on the other hand exists in the form of words, sentences, documents, organised data, computer programs and in other explicit form, in such a way that they can be directly and completely transferred from one person to another. Knowledge Management is a concept and a term that arose approximately two decades ago, it is said to be a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information. KM was initially defined as the process of applying a systematic

Knowledge Management is defined as the process of capturing, distributing and effectively using knowledge (Davenport, 1994) 1. It can also be refer as a multi-disciplined method in order to accomplish organizational objectives by fully utilized and generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets 6. Knowledge Management focuses on the gaining, creating, and sharing knowledge and technical foundations that support them 2. According to Grey, knowledge management is an audit of “intellectual assets” that highlights unique resources, critical functions and potential deadlocks which prevent knowledge flows to the point of use. It protects intellectual assets from decaying, seeks opportunities to improve decisions, services and products through adding intelligence, increasing value and providing flexibility (Grey , n.d) 5. On top of that, knowledge management includes a range of planning and practices used in an organization to classify, create, distribute and enable adoption of intuitions and experiences.

The process of collecting, transferring, storing and making information useful is also known as knowledge management. In this, the organization is enabled to grow, adapt to changes and meet customer demands. The information age has a most certain influence on how the organization manages knowledge. This is true of whether that knowledge is unique to the organization, or shared to external organizations. Today there are various ways to collect and compile data and turn that data into useful information; however, without the use of knowledge management, then data, information, and knowledge is lost or misused. Through the knowledge management process the organization has the ability to learn as an organization. This is

The article explains the system using Bateson theory. According to the theory, the Toyota Production System is divided into four levels: activities of the lowest level, strategies, values, and purpose, in that order. The strategies used in the system are: empowering employees, eliminating waste before it occurs, promoting flow, increasing effectiveness and efficiency at each stage, standardization, formalizing industrial engineering, creating intelligent processes, balancing resources, enabling visual management, increasing customer value, organizing by value stream and deploying policy. The values upheld are: respect for people, teamwork, kaizen (continuous improvement of employees) and genchi genbutsu (meaning “go see”). According to the system, the purpose of all these activities is to achieve perfection, contribution, honour and success (Nortje & Snaddon, 2013).

In contrast to Toyota’s statement that they will engage all employees’ ideas and suggestions, the Japan culture places a strict cultural

The concept of knowledge management (KM) has been used in different disciplines, mostly people use it in engineering and artificial intelligence area. Recently, more and more people realized that knowledge has become an important resource in business management. KM is about to deliver the right knowledge to the right people. At the same time, it can be retrieved and used its knowledge in any current applications or scenarios for people to analyze. Since KM has become more important in business strategic and tactical requirements, we conclude that knowledge management is the management of