LOS ANGELES - Toyota Motor Corp. set out to audit suppliers in North America following its biggest recall crisis and discovered testing of components wasn’t as rigorous as it expected, reported Bloomberg.

Some suppliers believed to be testing products four times a year were only doing so once a year, Dino Triantafyllos, vice president of North American product quality, said today.

“We have found areas where maybe there was a misunderstanding about some aspects of the process,” said Triantafyllos, who will attend a global quality meeting today at the carmaker’s Toyota City headquarters in Japan. “These improvements we’re making, if we’d made them two years ago, maybe some of these issues wouldn’t have happened.”

The world’s biggest carmaker is seeking to regain customer trust and market share after recalling more than 8 million vehicles globally for defects linked to unintended acceleration. In Toyota City, it added 40 engineers and created teams to scrutinize the designs of components, according to the company and an outside consultant.

“This crisis was a problem that came from the design- development stage,” said Hiroshi Osada, who leads a panel formed by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to help Toyota evaluate its efforts to boost quality.

Closer examination of components “should be able to help prevent quality defects,” said Osada, a professor of management at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the 2009 Deming Prize winner for contributions to quality control.

Suppliers’ books

Toyota also needs to look more carefully at the quality of suppliers’ finances, management and ability to expand their operations, he said.

The individual reviews in North America typically take about a week and include checks to ensure that assembly processes, such as arc welding of metal, are consistent. Engineers are examining parts considered critical to vehicle safety, such as those involved in braking and turning.

CTS Corp., the Elkhart, Ind.-based maker of accelerator pedal components that triggered the recalls in January, was among the first companies reviewed under the new system.

“They remain a supplier,” Triantafyllos said. “We have a good relationship with them.”

No parts suppliers have been dropped so far, he said.

The initial reviews, covering a quarter of the suppliers in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, uncovered no new defects. Toyota is a third of the way through audits of suppliers of “the highest priority” parts, and once they are completed, Toyota will expand them to all 700 partsmakers there, Triantafyllos said.

Fewer projects

With its heightened focus on quality, Toyota is reducing the number of new development projects, Masami Doi, a Toyota spokesman, said without specifying the scale of the cuts.

Until recently, Toyota’s North American operations had a limited role in design development and quality issues for vehicles made in Japan and sold in North America, said Steve St. Angelo, the region’s chief quality officer.

The carmaker said last week it added three chief engineers at its technical center in Ann Arbor, Mich., to focus on design. It is opening more than 30 field offices gathering quality-related data in each region, including seven in North America.

“We now play a decisive role in quality issues in Japan- made vehicles on the road today and vehicles being designed for the future,” St. Angelo said.