Question 1: What are the advantages to parts suppliers of Toyota's preferred partner relationships?
             Toyota has i¿½broken the moldi¿½ of conventional thinking of how an automotive company should deal with its suppliers. The major American automotive companies have long been notable for their highly competitive and contentious relationships with their suppliers. The conventional wisdom espoused by General Motors and Ford was that competition kept prices down. However, Toyota adopted a philosophy that was commensurate with the Japanese stress upon company cohesiveness and extended that relationship to outside suppliers.
             Japanese companies encourage workers to function as a team, and not compete against one another. Because Toyota derives 70 to 80 percent of its manufacturing from the same suppliers, suppliers wish to keep a close relationship with Toyota and provide a quality product, even advice, to the company to ensure that Toyota continues to prosper. i¿½Suppliers return the favor [of loyalty]: For example, many of the cost-cutting ideas that made Accord and Camry so successful came from suppliersi¿½ (Carey 2005). By agreeing upon target prices, costs of the supplies do not become prohibitive, and are also more reliable to predict when budgeting input costs. Target pricing and sharing information with suppliers has enabled Japan to design new cars much faster than their American counterparts, in just twelve to eighteen months compared with the American the industry norm of two to three years (Carey 2005). This enables Toyota to be more competitive against its American counterparts.
             Question 2: How might Toyota just-in-time (JIT) parts availability strategy work to its disadvantages?
             The objective of Toyotai¿½s Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing strategy is to ensure the minimal build-up of obsolete or overstocked inventory in the companyi¿½s warehouses. It has the i¿½objective of producing the right part in the...