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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Real Man who wrote (9270)	6/27/2008 2:33:38 AM
From: Gary Mohilner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71406

Vi, I know part of the theories behind moving much production offshore had to do with America providing more services. In part some of this panned out, but in reality in spite of greater labor costs, if American plants are modernized the way that we've modernized the foreign plants, the labor costs often become minimal. Where American's cannot compete is essentially when their hands are tied behind their backs by companies unwilling to modernize the plants here. I'm saddened by the way Toyota, Honda, Mercedes, Subaru, etc. all build cars here that rank equal to the quality of those built anywhere else in the world, and with the saving in shipping more then make up for the higher labor cost. What saddens me is that GM, Ford, and Chrysler cannot build cars that equal the quality of the foreign operated but American built cars. Many years ago I had the privilege of taking a multi day course with Dr.Edmund Deming, one of the Americans credited with the Japanese recovery after WWII. Deming taught the Japanese that in America we look to continuously improve the product, and they believe it was why we dominated them in WWII. They took him, and Dr. Juran who preached much the same message, seriously, and they continue to strive to improve no matter how good a product already is. Deming in his teaching here tried to get the same message out to Americans, but while Deming was insisting that you always should use the part that does the job best, in Federal procurement we require that the part which meets the specification and does the job cheapest is the part which must be selected. I know the Shuttle Astronauts always asked the question, how'd you like to sit on top of 3 million parts that you knew always came from the lowest priced supplier. I had to deal with Supply people who were proud that after 2 months they ground down the price of computers we were buying by $70 a machine for a net $350 savings. It didn't matter to them that by the time I got the machines I needed to work hundreds of overtime hours to get caught up with the work I had to defer because I didn't have the computers to do them on. The mentality of the Federal Govt. isn't that different in many private industries. Companies hide deficiencies in their products rather than admitting them until they're exposed. Correcting the exploding gas tanks in the Ford Falcon could have been done for something like $35 a car, it wasn't done in spite of learning they had a problem and it cost them tens of millions or more. We've seen the same sort of problems exposed in all sorts of industries where all they want to think about is the profit they're making today. Deming would try to show them that building a better profit will result in lowering costs, but American's didn't listen to him, the Japanese did. Gary