Suppliers and manufacturers

Interesting piece in our paper this morning: auto-industry suppliers are working hard at *improving* the quality of the stuff they supply to Toyota and Honda, but only *maintaining* the quality of the stuff they provide to the Big Three -- because the latter treat suppliers as adversaries rather than as partners.

MB

Reply to
Minnie Bannister
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Which is all very strange (but true) since the whole time the U.S. automakers were developing these new "quality" systems and "supplier" relationships, supposedly they were incorporating things that had been "learned from the Japanese". Instead what we got was the invention of "Lopezing" and "PICOS" (i.e., clever systems on how to screw the supplier without them realizing it until it was too late).

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

Course that might also be that the quality of stuff they supply to the big three is already good enough, and the quality of stuff they supply to Toyota and Honda has been abysmal.

Consider that Chrysler isn't domestically owned any longer, does it really qualify as a big three anymore?

There are many parts that you cannot just keep improving and improving and improving the quality on forever. Unless of course your regularly in the habit of letting the quality go into the toilet then improving it when people carped.

It reminds me of 20 years ago when I worked in a machine shop for a couple summers. We had 2 main bolt suppliers, Beaver Bolt, and Portland Screw. The black steel bolts from both were pretty much the same. The galvanized stuff was something else. The BB galvanized stuff was terrible, extra galvanizing material coming off it, etc. The Portland Screw stuff was really clean. You can probably guess which supplier was cheaper. And you can probably guess which supplier we used the most of. We would use BB until the quality got so awful that we would then go buy a whole pallet of Portland Screw bolts, then call in the Beaver Bolt salesman and point to the pallet and say "that's what we are going to be buying in the future unless you get your crap together" Then Beaver Bolt quality would improve greatly, for the next few orders, then start sliding again until we got so sick of working with it that we would have to repeat the song and dance again.

Unfortunately for both suppliers, that machine shop closed down years ago, due to corporate acquisition as you might expect. Both suppliers are still in business, although Beaver Bolt has renamed itself to Distribution Dynamics. I suspect that even 20 years ago, neither of these suppliers actually manufactured their bolts, they probably ordered them out of China.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

That is a gross over-simplification. You've obviously never worked in the design and manufacturing end of the modern auto industry. Quality is more than just tolerancing.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

Reply to
Bill Putney

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