Toyota Motors Europe - Case Study

A division of one of the world’s largest car manufacturers, Toyota Motor Europe (TME) sold more than 1.1 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles in 2006, marking its 10th consecutive year of record sales in Europe. TME and its distribution network together employs approximately 80,000 persons in Europe. This case study presents the complex challenges Toyota has successfully addressed through process improvement and implementation of a Learning Management System (LMS) for the company’s expansive dealer network.

The Challenge

Toyota Motor Europe has 28 independent national sales and marketing companies within 48 countries and has to provide information and training to ensure that its brands are consistently well-represented across Europe. Originally, training was classroom based but the dual aims of increasing sales and becoming the number one company in providing customer satisfaction made centralization of its training operations a primary goal to strengthen and unify the brand image. These requirements brought the new challenge of developing an IT-based infrastructure to support e-learning across TME. A system was already in operation in the United States division but, the dealership structure is not similar to the US division, and TME has the added complication of catering for the numerous languages and the cultural and legal differences that exist between different regions.

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