Stung by global criticism after a series of high-profile recalls the company is aiming to announce changes to its quality and disclosure practices in coming days in advance of Congressional hearings on the companys safety record in Washington next week and Chief Executive Akio Toyodas scheduled trip to the U.S. early next month according to two top company executives. The company on Monday scheduled a news conference for Wednesday evening at the companys Tokyo office. The company said the briefing to be held by Mr. Toyoda and quality chief Shinichi Sasaki will report on its progress … in its approach to quality. It wasnt clear how much of the change Toyota is considering will be detailed at the briefing. It will be Mr. Toyodas third news conference on the issue in less than two weeks. A Toyota spokesman declined to comment on what would be announced today. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the company streamlined the vehicle-development process skipping steps such as making physical prototypes to save time and money and to be more responsive to rapidly changing consumer preferences. Mr. Toyodas predecessor then-President Katsuaki Watanabe in 2006 told company engineers to rely less on virtual engineering or computer-aided design tools and take more time to make more physical prototypes to verify component and vehicle quality and reliability. The measure which was implemented in response to a sharp rise in the number of recalled vehicles in the U.S. and around the world in 2005 added as much as six months to projects that normally called for roughly two to three years of development lead time. Now as part of the soul-searching prompted by the latest quality crisis the company is revisiting the issue again a senior Toyota executive said. The company believes it might need to conduct even more physical tests on vehicles especially in areas with direct bearing on safety the executive said. As part of that broader effort Toyota engineers may be asked in some cases to verify the robustness of design changes they make during and after the product development process the executive added. Currently those engineering changes some of which are proposed by parts suppliers are approved by Toyota engineers without conducting physical tests although some are tested physically by the suppliers. That has to change the executive said pointing to a possible move by the company to do more physical checks to implement even small design changes. Mr. Sasaki the quality officer said earlier this month that the auto makers massive recall may also prompt it to alter the way designers scrutinize parts for quality and reliability. Mr. Sasaki told reporters that the company may have overlooked the need for the kind of reliability tests that look into how individual components perform as a whole inside the car under different environmental conditions. (Source: The WSJ