It's all related anyway. If your company wastes money in any area, either quality is going to suffer, or your prices are going to include the price tag for that waste.

 

Nice one

 

True... when manufacturers cheapen designs to the point they know it'll **** their customers off / alienate them all to save a buck or two here or there... reducing costs and then reinvesting the cost back into the product can be a matter of having an 'ok' product and a superior product.

How much is GM paying out in healthcare and retirement costs per car sold?

 

And yet they're still topping the latest quality surveys. AMAZING!!

 

^I'm with Rob on this one.

 

All high end German cars claim to come right out of the Fatherland on the ticket on the side window at the dealership. I was suprised to see a Golf come out of Mexico and then an R32 come out of Germany. Same with 3 Series (South Carolina) and M3 (Germany)

 

They say that quality design flaws are in the blueprints, not in the manufactering. Meaning that if a car company designs a car for high quality, they can have it built anywhere with those standards.
I read an article that said in Germany, the most sought after car image is a Mercedes Benz. however when they ask people which was the most pleasant to own (read: trouble free, reliable) Toyota topped the list. Not Japanese made ones, ones made in England, other places in Europe including some in TURKEY.

I think the automotive world of competition should be kept on a business level, instead of saying "Hey dem Japanese, dem don't know what a pick'em'up truck is, see? Dontcha'll want a Chevy insteed?"

Remember, dope sells itself; if your product is good enough you don't need to downgrade another one to promote your own.

 

It IS about quality. You can only reduce inventory if you have a consistent level of very high quality. If you don't you'll eventually get a 'bad' batch of parts and you'll shut the whole factory down because you don't have any 'good' inventory - now that you are "lean".

The other reason quality is high under JIT is that a batch of 'bad' parts will be very small, and found immediately - so the quality issue can be resolved promptly. If you make 50,000 parts and then store them for weeks, you may not found out you just made 50,000 pieces of junk until much later. Then the company will say "we can't scrap 50,000 parts you HAVE to use them."

Quality / JIT / Kaizen are all closely related and pretty much all are required.

 

Of course they're in the "blueprints". They're *DESIGN* flaws. They're separate and distinct from manufacturing or process flaws.

For example:

A widgit attaches with two screws and is symetrical. It can thus be installed upside down or right side up. This is a design flaw. A proper design would mean the widget would be asymetrical or have another design feature (poke yoke) so that it could only be installed correctly.

A welding machine is incorrectly set up for the metal thickness or unproperly maintained leading to poor welds. This is a process / manufacturing flaw. Another example would be an incorrect torque setting on a pnuematic screw driver.

Basically, it works like this. Ask a manufacturing engineer. He'll tell you that most of his problems are because of bad design. Ask a Design engineer. He'll tell you that his company's manufacturing facilites can't build sh*t.

BTW, toyota is trying to standardize both it's design AND manufacturing processes at every plant around the globe, in order to minimize both of these types of issues. Others are also trying to do this, but toyota is out in front right now.

 

Can we say "Jew"? How 'bout "Pole"?

It's just a contraction of a word, not a slur.

 

No, it's a slur and is derogratory. When was the last time you saw "***" in any credible news media? Do you read? I guess if you did you'd know why it was derogratory in the first place. Sorry if I'm harsh, but some of you guys need to pick up a newspaper or a book once in a while.

 

I tried to be polite and ask people be be more considerate, but asking nicely almost always gets ignored by the ignorant.

Now it is off-topic and and people want to push the limits of being decent when they know expressing something in a particular manner is simply not a nice. As I always say, this is not the kind of site to do that. If you disagree, this is not the site for you.

This one is done, and you all know who to thank.