2. Who are the “coordinators” referred to in the article?

What role have they played in educating Toyota’s workforce in promoting the TPS (Toyota Production System)

philosophy? Why are they so hard to replicate? By many measures, Toyota is still barreling along. The company’s net income of $10.49 billion in yen in the year ended March 31 [2004] not only exceeded those of rivals General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. combined, but set a record for any Japanese company. Toyota’s next big goal is to expand its share of the global market to 15% over the next decade, from 10% now. That would make Toyota roughly the same size No. 1 auto maker GM is today.

But there are signs that the company’s ambitious growth agenda is straining human and technical resources and undercutting quality, one of Toyota’s most critical strategic advantages. It is the kind of paradox many highly successful companies face: Getting bigger doesn’t always mean getting better.

Toyota still tends to outscore most rivals, including Detroit’s Big Three auto makers and European brands, on industry surveys of quality and reliability. But Toyota’s lead has narrowed and in certain key segments disappeared. “Toyota quality isn’t improving as fast as it should,” Toyota’s president, Fujio Cho, concedes in an interview. To stop the quality slide, Mr.Cho says Toyota has launched multiple “special task forces”

at trouble spots in places such as North America and China to overhaul shop-floor management. Toyota also has established a Global Production center in Toyota City to train midlevel factory managers so they can more effectively run plants outside Japan.Toyota now is re-evaluating some of its most fundamental operating strategies. “We are getting back to basics,” says Gary Convis, a Toyota managing officer, who is also president of the Georgetown plant