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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: KyrosL who wrote (213)	9/1/2005 5:41:23 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 219615

Yes, the Japanese car makers have virtually no retiree costs in the United States, but plenty of retiree costs back home in Japan which originally supplied the US. American management at many companies are lazy and incompetent. You rarely see the constant push toward perfection you see in Japanese manufacturers. My favorite example was the Zenith television plant in San Diego. They slowly produced televisions at a very high cost, 6% of which were defective. Zenith announced the closure of the plant due to their lazy over-paid workers. Sony offered to buy the plant and Zenith sold under pressure from the State of California. Sony re-hired all of the same workers with an increase in pay and similar benefits. Sony replaced the Zenith manufacturing equipment with their own. After a six week change over, the former Zenith plant with the same workers produced twice as many televisions with the same defect rate as Sony's plants in Japan. This famous incident is "Case Number One" at most Business Schools. As Arthur Deming has always said, "If you design your product so it can be easily assembled in a defective manner, it will be a significant percentage of the time." "Products must be designed with assembly time and quality foremost in mind." Japanese manufacturer do this while American manufacturers are decades behind. GM has a lab which routinely buys Toyota cars and disassembles them in hopes of learning how Toyota builds their cars so well and so inexpensively. Its very, very, sad. When GM blames their assembly workers for the arrogance and incompetence of GM management its tragic and pitiful. .