A lot of Japanese manufacturers like Toyota and Honda, some of the brands with a reputation for the highest quality and longest lasting cars, have factories in the US… and they’re cheaper to buy than a lot of US comparable vehicles. Why can the US not figure out how to make a high quality car that is affordable and one that lasts as long as these other manufacturers?
In: Engineering
I retired from a Toyota plant in the US just over 2 years ago.
In our training when I was hired, they told us that Big 3 companies decided how many cars they were going to make per month or per year and that’s what they did. They have cars sitting in the yards just waiting to be ordered by the dealer.
Toyotas projects what the dealers are going to want and give each plant the number of cars to build every month. It is up to the plant how they get this done but at the end of the month they are going to be darned close to, or slightly over the number given them.
I saw this in my time there. First of the month, we were told how many cars were going to be built each shift. If we had a breakdown, parts shortage, or other issues that interrupted production, we worked overtime that day and every day until those cars were made up. If something happened near the end of the month and we didn’t get our numbers, we heard about and we continued with the OT until it was met. But we saw our numbers change often based on lots of factors, including the economy.
The last 15 years there I worked on the docks unloading parts and delivering them to the lines so I directly saw how lean manufacturing works. We did not warehouse parts (inventory cost). The parts did come in ahead of time, there was some small buffering time. But everything we did on the dock was based on the lines running and cars moving, when they stopped working we did too.
Our management could track parts from the supplier to the cross dock to us. They knew where every trailer was at and exactly which parts were on it. They could call the cross dock to get a future trailer delivered so we could get a certain part from it. The supplier was notified so they could send extras to make that up eventually. I have been directed to be on my forklift at the dock door to wait for parts that had been air expedited from Japan, unloading them as soon as the dock plate we down because the whole line was stopped.
When the big tsunami hit Japan maybe 10 years ago we heard that some of the suppliers had actually be wiped from the face of the earth. We ran about 6 months before we started to see serious shortages but then they lasted for a long while. Same with Covid, we shut down for 7 weeks and some of our suppliers even longer. When everyone was up & running again the supply chain issues hit.
Quality was also a big deal, if we had a defect we had to sit with a team leader or group leader to come up with (in writing) a countermeasure that was passed to management. If we had another defect we had better be implementing that previous countermeasure or we had better have a good reason why. Three defects in a year, you got to “meet” one of the upper level managers.
I think Big3 has made some quality cars over the years, perhaps their biggest issue is they don’t ever want to see change. Toyota has always rolled with the flow, changing whatever was needed to keep business running good.
Please don’t think I am all pro-Toyota, to me it was a job that provided for my needs. A lot of the changes they were constantly making made the grunt employees lives less enjoyable, but I never, ever worried about losing my job. We were not union and I never wanted to be, we never had to worry about contracts and strikes and not getting paid and layoffs. We had great pay & benefits, including my retirement. But my wife & I drove a Hyundai & a f150.
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