Toyota, GM, and Ford differences

Built_Well · 2006-01-05T14:49:17+00:00

I'm cross-posting this in with the hope that GM will improve its quality of manufacturing and avoid bankruptcy.The latter half of the following Detroit News excerpt is especially helpful to GM.From the Detroit News: Toyota officials say the key to their system is that it taps the knowledge and insights of their team members.They also give them a lot of training and responsibility. At Georgetown, or any Toyota plant, any team member has the power to stop the line by pulling what is called an "andon" cord. The term "andon" is derived from the Japanese word for paper lantern.Once a worker pulls the cord, if the problem is not resolved before the car reaches the next stage of assembly, the line stops."It may hurt productivity, but it improves quality," said Brian Walters, J.D. Power research director.Toyota encourages employees to pull the cord, despite the line stoppages, to expose problems and address them quickly. In Georgetown, workers reach for their cords 2,500 times a shift, and stoppages amount to 6-8 minutes per shift.But, plant manager Convis said, "at Toyota, it's a problem if you run (the line) at 100 percent. Something isn't adding up, because life isn't (perfect) like that."For the past year and a half, andon cords have hung along the assembly lines at GM's Oshawa plant. But the concept can get muddled in translation."We used to get 17 andon pulls per day," said Rod McVeigh, a supervisor in the assembly plant. "We're now targeting six a day."But that might encourage workers to look out less for glitches.Dennis Pawley, Chrysler's former manufacturing chief and now a consultant teaching Japanese manufacturing methods, says of the Big Three: "They don't understand that they don't understand."

Jan 05, 2006 220 Replies

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Mike Hunter 20 years ago

Wrong, I have four domestics cars with anywhere from 100K to 300K on the clock. I drive my cars for two years then sell them to friends or neighbors, or give them to relatives. I see them run to high mileages and none of them have been problematic, foreign or domestic. Every manufacture is building good dependable vehicles today, there is no need to spend the extra bucks to buy foreign cars to get a good car.

mike hunt

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