Manufacturing Jobs Data: USA and China

Posted on April 7, 2006  Comments (6)

Manufacturing Productivity and the Shifting US, China, and Global Job Scenes-1990 to 2005 (working paper – July 2005) by William Ward, Clemson University:

Manufacturing productivity growth from 1990 to 2004 should have taken away 7.5 million of the 17.7 million manufacturing jobs that existed in the US in 1990, while GDP growth should have added back (at the new productivity levels of 2004) 5.7 million manufacturing jobs-for a net loss of 1.8 million. In fact, the US economy lost 3.3 million manufacturing jobs during that period
…
I find that 100% of the (3.0 million) manufacturing jobs lost since 2000 were lost to manufacturing productivity growth and that 100% of the (1.8 million) jobs that should have been added back by GDP growth in the US after 2000 were shifted to other sectors of the US economy than manufacturing.

In this paper he is examines the factors leading to a reduction in manufacturing job worldwide. He concludes that job losses are mainly due to increased manufacturing productivity (worldwide, manufacturing productivity is increasing and jobs are decreasing – including China). Read more

How Whirlpool Defines Innovation

Posted on April 7, 2006  Comments (0)

How Whirlpool Defines Innovation

now we say if we’re going to put any money in an innovation project, it has to sit on a migration path, it has to be something that the customer really wants, and it’s got to return an above-average profit.

I’m not sure I really agree with this description. However, perhaps within Whirlpool this is a helpful definition, as George Box says: “all models are wrong, some are useful.” Perhaps viewing innovation in this way is useful to them. Gary Hamel consults for Whirlpool and knows a great deal about innovation so who am I to judge.
Read more

Toyota Again Get Positive Press

Posted on April 7, 2006  Comments (0)

Toyota Eyes Chance to Pass by Anthony Faiola, Washington Post:

The mainstream press continues to note the success of Toyota.

Toyota has been toying with hybrid engines for the past 20 years. But the company began to seriously pursue a mass-producible hybrid in 1993. Ogiso, 45 years old and now the chief engineer on the third-generation Prius still under development, said the edict came from Eiji Toyoda, the patriarch of the Toyota family who headed the company until 1994.

Ogiso said Toyoda had grown increasingly concerned that gas-engine auto manufacturing would eventually become a sunset industry given the limits of global oil supplies and increasing pressure to curb emissions. Focused more on a long-term advantage than the short-term gains that U.S. automakers are under pressure from Wall Street to produce, Toyota put hundreds of engineers to work on creating a new engine that would double average gas mileage and cut emissions by 80 percent. Conventional engines were quickly ruled out. “We found that the only way to achieve that goal was building a whole new type of car,” Ogiso said.

Read more

Seduce Them With Six Sigma Success

Posted on April 6, 2006  Comments (0)

Seduce Them With Success by Jay Arthur:

Instead the change agents are going around talking to operational managers, learning their problems and offering to help solve them. Then, using the tools of Six Sigma, they find remarkable, unexpected solutions that reduce costs and increase speed and profitability.

Oddly enough, the people on those improvement teams seem to know how to continue solving problems. And they tell their co-workers. And the operational manager’s success makes his or her colleagues curious. Then the Six Sigma change agent gets a call to help another manager solve a problem. And so it goes until the Six Sigma system is operating well in the mission-critical elements of the business.

This is the way to get management improvement to take hold. Use successes to create a desire to improve. It is always nice if the leaders are on board, it helps in many ways. But whether they are or not, those seeking to promote management improvement need to pay close attention to how much desire exists to improve (using six sigma or lean or process improvement or quality management tools).

If most people think the efforts are just the latest fad it is very difficult to have any lasting success.

More six sigma articles.

Lean Thinking Needed

Posted on April 6, 2006  Comments (0)

Bank Wire Transfers vs. FedEx Delivery

My goal was to give them all the paperwork, ensure I had sufficient funds, and schedule the transfer such that the money arrives in the sellers’ account on a particular date next week.

But they can’t do that. They cannot hold the paperwork for any amount of time. They’ll process it the same day I turn it in. I guess I can understand that. They’re a bank, not a scheduling service.

However, they can’t tell me which day to drop of the paperwork to ensure that the funds arrive on my target date. The teller informed me that “it usually takes 48 hours, but that doesn’t mean the funds will be available on the other end.”
… Read more

Lean Enterprise Institute Expands

Posted on April 5, 2006  Comments (0)

Lean Enterprise Institute Expands Services to Growing Lean Community

“LEI is introducing new programs, led by new people, at a new location to improve the practice of lean, the search for lean knowledge, and how we share the knowledge across the world,” said James P. Womack, LEI founder and chairman. Based on customer research, LEI has formed into four units — Lean Learning Materials, Lean Education, Lean Enterprise Partners, and Lean Events — to align with the needs of the Lean Community, Womack said.
Read more

Womack Podcast on GM

Posted on April 5, 2006  Comments (0)

Topic: Management Improvement, Toyota Production System

Womack Audio on Bloomberg.com (14 minutes) via the Lean Blog, where they quote from the audio:

“What do they worry about? They worry about the fact the system is still driven out of Japan and they’re everywhere now in terms of factories, in terms of R&D, but the fact is, to put the discipline in the system, that force, that energy is still coming out of Toyota City. How do they diffuse that energy so it’s not coming from one place? I don’t have the answer. They don’t have the answer. But they think about it every day.”

Read more

Lean Manufacturing Success

Posted on April 4, 2006  Comments (0)

Oshkosh Truck Driven to Succeed by Arlen Boardman:

Wuest said this reduced the order-to-delivery time from 12 to 16 weeks to seven days. It made better use of manufacturing space and reduced inventory-holding costs. He said it does many more things, like create an orderly work area, so tools are where they’re supposed to be, and parts are made when needed, one at a time.

“The goal is to turn an order into cash as quickly as you can,” he said.

Specialists in lean manufacturing systems were hired to help at Oshkosh Truck, including ones from General Motors and Ford Motor, among other big-name companies. This specialized team instills a belief in the changes and then conducts the training for the workers.

Not only is this a nice story but it is one small example of the good people working at GM and Ford. The problem is not the individual workers it is management. It is too bad that those companies, that did take great strides in the 1980 and early 1990s to improve (starting with Deming’s Management ideas) let those efforts fade away.
Read more

Problems with Bonuses

Posted on April 3, 2006  Comments (5)

What sort of bonuses should we pay? by Seth Godin:

Money, it’s been shown time and time again, is a demotivator. I’m not talking about a fair or even generous salary. Being a cheapskate is no way to find a great employee. But once people have joined your team, incremental money–bonuses and the like–usually demotivate people.

He is right. Why salary bonus and other incentives fail to meet their objectives by Dale Asberry.

Lean Manufacturing Visionary Jim Womack On Frontiers Of Lean Thinking by Jim Womack Read more

Toyota Powers to the Front

Posted on April 2, 2006  Comments (1)

Toyota powers to the front

(Toyota President, Katsuaki Watanabe) eschews the normal management mantra of shareholder value above all. A company’s purpose, Watanabe insists, is to be useful to society.

W. Edwards Deming described the purpose of an organization in New Economics, on page 51, as:

The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain -
stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment – over the long term.

More from our previous post on the purpose of an organization

More lean thinking (Toyota Production System) articles.

US Manufacturing Plant Construction

Posted on April 2, 2006  Comments (4)

Breaking Ground by Jeff Moad:

Last year, according to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, investment in new manufacturing plant construction increased 25%. That compares to a decline of 6.5% in 2003 and an increase in 2004 of 9.7%

As we have noted earlier, the United States is by far the leading manufacturer in the world: Global Manufacturing Data by Country and Manufacturing and the Economy (Japan is second and China third and growing rapidly).
Read more

People: Team Members or Costs

Posted on April 1, 2006  Comments (1)

Inside TPS at Toyota, Georgetown, Kentucky by Ralph Rio:

Toyota believes people need to be intimately involved with the process to understand how to improve it. The team member writes the standardized work they use because the person performing the work is the true expert. People are trusted to understand the process and improve it.

Automation is used but is seen as a tool for helping people manage the process. This can be contrasted with the effort by GM in the 1990′s to spend billions of dollars on robots to save personnel costs.

Both Toyota and GM seek to use technology to improve but Toyota sees the technology as useful to help people to be more efficient, eliminate menial repetitive tasks, eliminate tasks that cause injury… and it seems to me GM saw technology as a way to eliminate people. The action showed a company that viewed people as a cost to be eliminated. GM did not act as though people were their “most important assets” as we so often hear, but see so little evidence of in the action of companies.
Read more

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