Posts about cars
Ackoff agile management aim airlines Amazon archive Asia ASQ Influential Voices awards bad customer service bad management bad service basketball Bezos Bill Hunter blogs bonus Books Brian Joiner build capacity business Canada Career Carnival cars change charity charts checklist China Clayton Christensen coaching commentary commissions communication complexity continual improvement control chart cool Creativity culture curiouscat Curious Cat Links Customer focus customer service Data Deming Deming Prize demotivate Design of Experiments disruptive innovation Douglas McGregor economic data Economics economy Education engineering entrepreneur ethics Europe evidence based management executive pay experiments extrinsic motivation fear feedback France Fun gemba George Box Germany global Google government guest post Health care health care system hiring in-process measures India Innovation inspection inspiration internet intrinsic motivation Investing IT Japan jobs Joel Spolsky John Hunter Joy in Work kanban layoffs leadership lean lean healthcare lean management lean manufacturing lean six sigma Lean thinking learning lecture long term thinking Madison management Management Management Articles management consulting management experts management history management research management tools management webcast managers managing people Manufacturing marketing meetings Mexico motivation online resources open access open source overpaid executives Paul Graham PDSA Performance Appraisal Peter Scholtes photos poka yoke Poppendieck Popular prediction previous posts problem solving Process improvement productivity program management programming project management Psychology Public Sector purpose quality quality management experts Quality tools quota quote regulation research Respect respect for people retail Ruby Science seminar short term thinking simplicity Singapore Six sigma Software Development South America SPC stakeholders standardization Statistics Statistics for Experimenters stockholders suppliers Systems thinking system thinking tags Taiichi Ohno targets teams TED Tesco Thailand Theory of Constraints theory of knowledge tips Toyota Toyota Production System (TPS) TQM training travel Travel photos UK uncategorized USA usability variation visual communication visual instructions visual management visual work instructions Warren Buffett waste webcast webcasts William Hunter Wisconsin Womack work workplace improvement

Looking at Auto Manaufacturing in the USA

Posted on February 6, 2012  Comments (0)

America’s Dirty War Against Manufacturing

Bob Lutz, the former head of GM, says it was neither uncompetitive wages nor unions that drove the Big Three into decline. It was a management with its eye focused on the bottom line and the short term.

That sentiment should be familiar to students of Deming (it is one of Deming’s 7 deadly diseases). It is sad that this bad management practices, short-term thinking, continues to do harm several decades later. Hopefully we can do better in the next few decades.

retiree health care and pensions — burdens that are borne by society, not manufacturing plants, in every other advanced country. That disparity, the result of policy decisions made in Washington rather than wages negotiated by the United Auto Workers, was the source of most of the labor-cost advantage enjoyed by foreign companies.

The excessive health care costs in the USA, another of Deming’s 7 deadly diseases, has continued to get worse every year since he classified it as one. The damage that the failed health care system in the USA does to the USA is enormous.

Related: Manufacturing Skills Gap or Management Skills Gap? – Manufacturing in the USA, and Why Organizations Often Don’t – Big Failed Three, Meet the Enlightened Eight

Penske to Buy Saturn from GM

Posted on June 7, 2009  Comments (1)

Penske to Buy Saturn from GM

“When Saturn launched in the 1980s, it was the new, new thing, with the best dealer service and no-haggle pricing that put customers at ease,” said independent marketing consultant Dennis Keene. “But in recent years, it has just been another GM division, operating the same as Chevy or Pontiac, with nothing to differentiate it and a marketing message that keeps changing, so that people haven’t been able to get a handle on what the brand is supposed to be.”
…
First off, he won’t own any manufacturing plants. Saturn will continue to buy today’s vehicles from GM for at least two years. Penske will talk to other auto manufacturers in Europe and Asia about supplying new products after that. “We are going to be a sales, service, and marketing company, not an OEM [original equipment manufacturer],” he said. Eventually, Penske explained, he wants at least some Saturn vehicles to once again be manufactured in the U.S., though that may not be the case in the short run after the agreement with GM runs out.

I thought Saturn was the worst management failure at GM, among many (NUMMI, and GM’s Failure to Manage Effectively, for example). They really did some great things early on with rethinking the system of manufacturing and selling cars. But GM failed to take care of the innovative division. I hoped that Saturn would gain a new, better, management that build Saturn toward the potential it has. Contracting out manufacturing however, is a horrible idea, I believe. Unfortunately I think this ends the hope for a great Saturn.

Saturn still have the potential to do ok, given how bad the dealership experience is for most other companies. The dealer experience, even for Toyota and Lexus is still not at all congruous with the customer focus principles of lean (for example, motivating sales people to make as bad a deal for customers as they can – paying them more the more they get for the dealership at the expense of the customer). And other car companies have quite a bit to learn from the sales practices of Saturn and Car Max.

Related: Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight – Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – People: Team Members or Costs – Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company, 1986

NUMMI, and GM’s Failure to Manage Effectively

Posted on February 25, 2009  Comments (2)

Gipsie Ranney recently sent me an article on her thoughts on NUMMI and the current problems with the Big Three car makers to post to the Curious Cat Management Improvement Library. NUMMI is the plant that Toyota and General Motors run together as a joint venture. The article is excellent.

The answer to a question asked by someone else on the tour was stunning to me. The person asked what kind of computerized inventory system they had at NUMMI. The leader of the tour at the time – a materials management person – responded, “we don’t have one; the Japanese say that computerized inventory systems lie.”
…
The most remarkable insight I gained at NUMMI came as an answer to a question from a member of the touring group. The person asked what had been learned about the reasons that management/labor conflict had been reduced so much. The tour guide answered, “The answer we get from members of the labor force is that the Japanese do what they say they will do.” This was the same labor force that had held the record for most grievances filed per year in an assembly plant in the U.S.
…
The Big Three are responsible for managing their organizations wisely. I think that will take more than money. It will take a different culture and a different mind.

I agree. The problem is that management fails to manage well and has been failing to do so for decades. They have improved over the last few decades but not nearly fast or consistently enough. Gipsie worked closely with Dr. Deming and serves on the W. Edwards Deming Institute Board of Trustees.

Related: Could Toyota Fix GM (2005) – At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s – Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight – Why Fix the Escalator? – Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company (AMC) by William Hunter, 1986 – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota

Failure: Honda’s Secret to Success

Posted on February 3, 2009  Comments (2)

Related: Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year – Inside Honda’s Brain – Curious Cat Engineering Blog

Big Failed Three, Meet the Successful Eight

Posted on December 15, 2008  Comments (1)

Big Three, Meet the “Little Eight”

The 1,300-acre plant, in which Toyota has invested $5.3 billion, produces a car roughly every minute. Georgetown’s population has doubled. In fields where farmers once grew tobacco and raised cattle, McMansions, apartment complexes, and condominiums have sprouted. A 150,000-square-foot upscale retail center is rising near the Toyota plant, the better to serve its 7,000 employees.
…
In San Antonio, the Toyota Tundra plant lay idle for three months this fall, though Toyota hasn’t laid off anyone. Instead, according to Richard Perez, president and CEO of the Greater San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, Toyota offered the city “a whole bunch of folks who need to get busy.” (San Antonio put them to work on beautification projects.) Of course, Toyota has resources to act in a more paternalistic manner – in part because the parent companies aren’t saddled with the burdens of providing health care and retirement for workers in home markets.

This is not behaving in a paternalistic manner, this is behaving in an honorable manner with the other long term stakeholders that have a shared interest in the long term success of the company. When managers and executives do their jobs the company will succeed in good times and have a plan for bad times and will deal effectively with obvious long term issues. Health care costs, pensions costs, and bad labor-management relations have been obvious critical issues to solve for GM, Ford and Chrysler for decades. The pathetic job those 3 have done with those, and other issues (they still don’t understand how to work with suppliers, how to stop the obsessive focus on quarterly profits, how to demand honorable behavior [not looting] from senior executives…), lead to their current situation.

The poor economy leads the the situation you now see with Toyota and Honda: profits being cut, having to put in place plans to retain employees while they are not needed to produce output today, etc.. You don’t see companies needing billions to survive a few months unless they were incredibly poorly lead. And those leading them were paid many times more than those that led Toyota and Honda. They have had decades to act responsibly. They have failed. And there failure will be felt by those that enabled them to take huge pay packages that were not warranted. They should be ashamed.
Continue reading →

Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

Posted on November 25, 2008  Comments (6)

Engineers Rule, 2006

Longtime auto analyst John Casesa, who now runs a consulting company, says, “There’s not a company on earth that better understands the culture of engineering.” The strategy has worked thus far. Honda has never had an unprofitable year. It has never had to lay off employees.
…
The lean and compact Fukui, like all of his predecessors, is an engineer who started in R&D and later ran the subsidiary. While other auto chief-executives-to-be were punching keyboards in an accounting office, Fukui ran the company’s motorcycle racing operations. He’s still racing. He hikes the stairs to his tenth-floor desk–tenth floor so he’s in the middle of things at Honda’s 16-story Tokyo headquarters and a desk because executives at Honda don’t have offices. Honda doesn’t disclose executive pay in detail, but the sum of salaries and bonuses that Fukui shares with 36 board members, $13 million, is just about enough for the boss at a big American company.

I checked and Honda was also profitable in 2007 and 2008 fiscal year (ending in September) and no I see no evidence of any layoffs this year (when I look online).

Related: Honda Engineering – Back to School for Honda Workers, 1993 – The Google Way: Give Engineers Room – Google’s Ten Golden Rules – Toyota as Homebuilder – Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog – Toyota’s CEO pay under $1 million

Of all the bizarre subsidiaries that big companies can find themselves with, Harmony Agricultural Products, founded and owned by Honda Motor, is one of the strangest. This small company near Marysville, Ohio produces soybeans for tofu. Soybeans? Honda couldn’t brook the sight of the shipping containers that brought parts from Japan to its nearby auto factories returning empty. So Harmony now ships 33,000 pounds of soybeans to Japan. An inveterate tinkerer, Honda also set up a center nearby to develop better soybean varieties and improve agricultural processes.

Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company, 1986

Posted on November 22, 2008  Comments (0)

Invest in New Management Methods Not a Failing Company by William Hunter, 1986

I predict American Motors will stop making cars in Wisconsin in the near future, whether or not the state’s money is used for a temporary propping-up operation.

These competitors are beginning to understand how essential it is to take a long-term view of their businesses. Toyota, for example, took its top 40 managers on a two-day retreat to ponder what their corporation will look like in the 21st century. They are studying totally new methods of management [20 years later large portions of these "new" methods are still ignored by many - John]. These methods take continuous quality improvement as a central, guiding principle.
…
Investing in American Motors now, in any form, is a mistake. If Wisconsin is to become a trend-setter in economic development, we need some long-term thinking in forming wise, creative policies.
It is difficult, I know, for legislators and other elected officials to take a long-term view when the tangible reward is re-election and elections come around quite frequently.
Our founding fathers are remembered for their long-term vision. We need to change the way our democracy works so that long-term visions is an integral part of all important discussions on economic development on the local, state and national level.

Don’t reward shortsightedness by James Cook

In 1985 I assumed the role of plant manager of one of the world’s foremost automotive tool manufacturers in a small northern Iowa town. It was then that I was introduced to W. Edwards Deming. At the time, the company had a greater market share than any of its individual domestic or foreign competitors, but ominous and encroaching signs from abroad began to threaten its pre-eminence in the automotive aftermarket. So steps had to be taken to arrest this incursion that could mean the end of its reign.

It was then, as I began my tenure at the company, that we began with Deming’s concept of Statistical Process Control, later changed to Quality Control, and the practice of Toyota’s kanban cell manufacturing techniques that would enhance the already high-quality standards that had defined the company for decades.
…
If we had listened, if we had followed him, if we had incorporated his thinking not only in the automobile industry but in government, in the ubiquitous economy collapsing around us and in our private lives, we would now be far better for it.

Related: At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s – Ford’s Wrong Turn – Could Toyota Fix GM (2005) – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – Creating Jobs

Ford’s Camaçari Plant in Brazil

Posted on November 18, 2008  Comments (3)

photo of Fords' Camacari plant in Brazil

Brazil’s Camaçari plant is model for the future

This state-of-the-art manufacturing complex in the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia is not only the centerpiece of Ford’s Brazilian turnaround plan, it is also one of the most advanced automobile plants in the world. It is more automated than many of Ford’s U.S. factories, and leaner and more flexible than any other Ford facility. It can produce five different vehicle platforms at the same time and on the same line.
…
At Camaçari, more than two dozen suppliers operate right inside the Ford complex, in many cases producing components alongside Ford’s main production line. Having those supplier operations on-site allows Ford to take the concept of just-in-time manufacturing to a whole new level. Inventories are kept to a bare minimum, or dispensed with entirely. Components such as dashboard assemblies flow directly into the main Ford assembly line at the precise point and time they are needed.
…
Unlike many U.S. auto plants, where workers’ responsibilities are strictly limited to specific job classifications, workers like Silva dos Santos are encouraged to learn as many different skills as possible.

Here is an interesting video on the plant. It is sad how poor management at GM, Ford and Chrysler has created such a bad situation for those working at those companies, their suppliers, the communities that support their production… GM and Ford had the advice they needed to succeed from Deming in the 1980′s but they chose to focus on the short term, large executive payments, accounting gimmicks instead of continual improvement…

They each have improved over the years, but the standard is not just improving but doing so effectively and enough and they failed at that. The UAW shares some responsibility for failing to successfully lead their workers to a promising future but management is much more responsible for the failure in my opinion (the video and article try to say Ford wants to be innovative in the USA but the UAW won’t let them). It is management’s jobs to focus the organization on cooperation and success for all stakeholders. When management is more concerned with getting themselves huge payoffs (from the pockets of the other stakeholders) and then try to blame one of those other stakeholders for fighting management is disingenuous. Executive’s contempt for other stakeholders leads to the other stakeholders feeling that they should be just as greedy as management.

Related: Ford’s Wrong Turn – Ford and Managing the Supplier Relationship – Global Manufacturing Data 2007 – Toyota’s New Texas Plant – Womack Podcast on GM – VW Phaeton Manufacturing plant
Continue reading →

Outsourcing To America

Posted on May 30, 2008  Comments (0)

Outsourcing To America

Toyota (TM) began operating in North America in the mid-1980s. It currently operates seven automotive plants there, four of which are in the U.S. A fifth plant is under production in Mississippi. Toyota employs 40,000 manufacturing employees in North America.

In addition to the manufacture of cars and trucks, Toyota runs four unit factories in the U.S., where they produce such parts as engines, transmissions and wheels. Toyota also has a wholly owned subsidiary, Bodine Aluminum, an aluminum casting company, which operates three factories in Tennessee and Missouri.

BMW began operations in the U.S. in 1994, when it opened a plant in Spartanburg, S.C. “Some natural hedging was always a part of the long-term strategy, but also we have a corporate strategy of having production follow the market,” says Robert Hitt, BMW’s manager of public affairs. “Our original plan was to have about 2,000 workers here by the year 2000. We are now at 5,400 people here on the site.”
…
Besides the actual manufacturing of their cars and trucks, Toyota and BMW are using domestic suppliers to provide parts and services for their operations. BMW has over 200 suppliers in North America, 52 of which are located in South Carolina, and 41 of these are new companies started for the purpose of supplying the plant. In South Carolina alone, suppliers of BMW’s Spartanburg plant employ over 14,000 people.

Toyota uses roughly 500 major suppliers in North America. “We’ve always had the philosophy that we should build vehicles where they are sold, so it makes sense to have suppliers close to your manufacturing operations,” says Mike Goss, external affairs manager for Toyota’s engineering and manufacturing division in North America.

Foreign production in the U.S., however, is not limited to the automotive industry…. In fact, almost 1 million Americans get their paychecks from Mexican companies, says Ton Heijmen, senior adviser for outsourcing and offshoring for the Conference Board.

Related: Top 10 Manufacturing Countries 2006 – Moving Jobs to Silicon Valley from India – Global Manufacturing Jobs Data – Toyota in the United States of America Economy – China Outsourcing Manufacturing to USA

Deming Auto Repair

Posted on May 20, 2008  Comments (7)

Here is an interesting example of an auto repair shop applying Deming’s ideas, AGCO Automotive in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

In this section we hope to present our business philosophy, through a series of articles written by president Louis Altazan. Our strategy of continual improvement is based on the work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and has been incredibly successful for us. There is nothing we enjoy more than discussing our methods and invite all questions and comments.

The site includes several interesting articles including, Motivating Our Staff:

Clients often ask how we motivate our staff members. The answer is simple, we don’t. We feel good people are already motivated, what they need is removal of the things that de-motivate them
…
I also believe this is a far superior state with regard to production, quality, efficiency and human relations than the one that commonly exist in the incentive driven system. It requires management that trust people to do what is best, rather than rely on a system of punishment and reward. It requires management that trust its own ability to share vision and remove obstacles to joy in work. Management’s job shifts from a controller of reward to a leader of an inwardly motivated team of people.

Related: Deming Companies – Stop De-motivating Employees – Deming Management Thoughts – At Ford, Quality Was Our Motto in the 1980s
Continue reading →

Toyota’s Commitment

Posted on March 8, 2008  Comments (4)

From Toyota’s blog, Living Up to Our Commitment

We’ve received reports that on a small number of model-year 1995 to 2000 Tacomas, excessive corrosion of the frame has caused perforation of the metal. The reason for this, it appears, is that the frames of some of the 813,000 vehicles built during this time-frame may not have adequate corrosion protection.
…
Because of our oft-stated commitment to standing behind our products, we’re extending the rust-perforation warranty covering these trucks for a period of 15 years from each vehicle’s original date of purchase, with no mileage limitation, for corrosion damage that results in perforation of the vehicle’s frame material. Owners of these Tacomas need not be the original owners. Even if you bought your Tacoma second- or third-hand, it’s covered by this extended warranty.

Once again Toyota shows what it means to go beyond the traditional way of thinking (where often MBA bean-counters and lawyers decide what should be done) instead of someone interested in having the company actually live up to a higher mission. From a previous post on their blog:

The Toyota Way is a management philosophy involving 14 principles that is the essence of the DNA of our organization and really all those who make up the company. In its basic form, the Toyota Way boils down to two fundamental practices: Respect for People and Continuous Improvement.

Related: Toyota IT Overview – Deming Companies – Reacting to Product Problems – Toyota Management Develops the New Camry – Corporate Blogging – Dell Innovation

Inside Honda’s Brain

Posted on March 7, 2008  Comments (1)

Inside Honda’s brain by Alex Taylor III

why is Honda playing with robots? Or, for that matter, airplanes? Honda is building a factory in North Carolina to manufacture the Hondajet, a sporty twin-engine runabout that carries six passengers. Or solar energy? Honda has established a subsidiary to make and market thin-film solar-power cells. Or soybeans? Honda grows soybeans in Ohio so that it can fill up cargo containers being shipped back to Japan. The list goes on. All this sounds irrelevant to a company that built some 24 million engines last year and stuffed them into everything from cars to weed whackers.
…
Since 2002 its revenues have grown nearly 40%, to $94.8 billion. Its operating profits, with margins ranging from 7.3% to 9.1%, are among the best in the industry.
…
The wellspring of Honda’s creative juices is Honda R&D, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honda Motor. Based in Saitama, west of Tokyo, R&D engineers create every product that Honda makes – from lawn mowers to motorcycles and automobiles – and pursue projects like Asimo and Hondajet on the side. Defiantly individualistic, R&D insists on devising its own solutions and shuns outside alliances. On paper it reports to Honda Motor, but it is powerful enough to have produced every CEO since the company was founded in 1948.
…
The engineer in Fukui [Honda's president and CEO] cannot help but be intrigued by what his former colleagues are up to, and his office is only a few steps away from Kato’s. But even with the CEO just down the hall, says Kato, “We want to look down the road. We do not want to be influenced by the business.”
…
mistakes like the Insight are also the exception. R&D has provided Honda with a long list of engineering firsts that consumers liked, including the motorcycle airbag, the low-polluting four-stroke marine engine, and ultralow-emission cars.

Related: Toyota as Homebuilder – S&P 500 CEOs – More Engineering Graduates – More on Non-Auto Toyota – Asimo Robot, Running and Climbing Stairs – Applied Research – Google Engineering Energy

Car Powered Using Compressed Air

Posted on February 25, 2008  Comments (11)

car powered using compressed air

Jules Verne predicted cars would run on air. The Air Car is making that a reality. The car would be powered by compressed air. Certainly seem like an interesting idea. Air car ready for production:

Refueling is simple and will only take a few minutes. That is, if you live nearby a gas station with custom air compressor units. The cost of a fill up is approximately $2.00. If a driver doesn’t have access to a compressor station, they will be able to plug into the electrical grid and use the car’s built-in compressor to refill the tank in about 4 hours.

The car is said to have a driving range of 125 miles so by my calculation it would cost about 1.6 cents per mile. A car that gets 31 mpg would use 4 gallons to go 124 miles. At $3 a gallon for gas, the cost is $12 for fuel or about 9.7 cents per mile. I didn’t notice anything about maintenance costs. I don’t see any reason why the Air Car would cost more to maintain than a normal car. Five-seat concept car runs on air

An engineer has promised that within a year he will start selling a car that runs on compressed air, producing no emissions at all in town.
…
Tata is the only big firm he’ll license to sell the car – and they are limited to India. For the rest of the world he hopes to persuade hundreds of investors to set up their own factories, making the car from 80% locally-sourced materials.
…
“Imagine we will be able to save all those components traveling the world and all those transporters.” He wants each local factory to sell its own cars to cut out the middle man and he aims for 1% of global sales – about 680,000 per year. Terry Spall from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers says: “I really hope he succeeds. It is a really brave experiment in producing a sustainable car.”

Now does that sound like the Toyota Production System to you? It should. If I were an executive at Toyota I would sure examine this to see if it really is as promising as it looks. And if it is Toyota sure has plenty of cash and the management practice to make a very compelling case for allowing Toyota to produce this globally. The engineers desires closely match what Toyota has learned. Both seek to eliminate the waste of transportation (friction).

Related: Click Fraud = Friction for Google – Manufacturing Takes off in India – Electric Automobiles

Toyota Presses On

Posted on February 24, 2008  Comments (0)

At Toyota, a Global Giant Reaches for Agility

With plants in 27 countries, more new factories under construction and workers speaking languages that include Russian and Turkish, Toyota’s top executives are trying a difficult balancing act – replicating the company’s success and operating principles in other countries while ceding more control to these new outposts at the same time.
…
Next year, it expects to sell more than 10.4 million cars worldwide, double what it sold in 2000.
…
At Motomachi, more than 3,000 tasks on the assembly line have been translated into video manuals that are displayed on laptop computers above 30 simulated workstations, situated where their functions would be carried out inside the factory.

The videos show everything from the correct way to hold a screw to the best way to hold an air gun so that a worker’s hand will not tire in a few hours. This month, workers from Toyota’s plant in Thailand took part in training required for jobs in their plant’s paint shop. Listening as an interpreter translated from Japanese into Thai, the workers were shown how to bend their knees and spray a water gun across a clear panel of Plexiglas.

Yet another article on the management of Toyota. And here is another: Toyota heir slowly following in family footsteps. And another: Toyota explores more efficient methods to build cars.

Related: 12 Stocks for 10 Years Feb 2008 Update – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – New Articles on Toyota Management – Toyota’s Effort to Stay Toyota – More Positive Press for Toyota Management – Toyota in the US Economy

Good Customer Service Example

Posted on July 9, 2007  Comments (1)

IRA Toyota – Milford; Great Service

I was pleasantly surprised to find a “Service wizard” available. You create an account, specify the standard details about the car (make, model, year, mileage). If you add the VIN, they will be able to provide and maintain additional details.

The slickest part of the wizard was the capability to pick a service and schedule a date. Depending upon what service you picked, the calendar changed. This wasn’t any old calendar. This was dynamic. Clearly, they had predefined the capability of handling some number of services per day. It was likely also interactive depending upon what was already scheduled for that day. This all makes wonderful sense but I had not seen this before.

I went ahead and scheduled the service for Monday AM planning to drop the car off Sunday night. Saturday, we received an email reminding us of the service scheduled for the car. Sunday, Allison and I drive over to their location, pull into the lot following the “Service” sign and find lanes specially marked for night drop off. There were already some cars in the lanes so we found a spot. The box on the wall had a pen and several forms. We filled out one and put the keys in the envelop through the clearly marked “key drop” slot. This group has figured out service and seems to have thought of everything. The drive home continued the conversation on how well they have planned for service; web site wizard, email reminders, lanes for drop off, etc. Well done!

I think the lean folks will like the level loading the dynamic calendar facilitates (and all the other ways the process provided value to the customer). This strategy levels the load by pushing around demand a bit (rather than just accommodating whatever demand exists – real world conditions can make this the correct strategy). For example, if special machines are needed for certain jobs and the long term demand supports one of each such machine and if you can adjust the flow to level out the demand doing so is a good strategy. As this example shows, customers have flexibility in scheduling preventative maintenance; therefore take advantage of that in your system design.
Continue reading →