These days (December 2006) there is talk of a strategic commitment between the Ford Motors firms in the United States and the Toyota in Japan. The North Americans initiated the contacts, the question that can be asked is why? There are several reasons, one of them claims to be the need to produce engines with lower fuel consumption and the second the imperative need to reduce costs.
Let's start with the second aspect, that is, cost reduction. North American managers never came to understand or assimilate the Toyota Production philosophy and system. In the first place, they have failed to take due account of the importance of quality to generate an increase in productivity and reduce costs, and secondly, to pursue results in the short term, away from the perspective of improving processes in the medium term. long term. With the passing of time, the continuous improvement "kaizen" of the Japanese ended up strategically and competitively outperforming the American company.
The Ford company has not been able to assimilate the concept of the Six "F", concentrating like other companies in its country the search for a competitive advantage in computer systems. The generation of software lacking flexibility, fluidity and information generator by exception leads companies to the generation of rigid, heavy, computing superstructures that generate thousands of unproductive data. They have forgotten that the first thing is to improve and innovate the processes, and then just generate new computer designs. Of course, computing can and is in a position to generate significant leverage in the business phases, but solutions cannot be built from computing but from processes.
Achieving foundation, flexibility, strength, reliability, flow and fidelity in the processes and activities of a company requires a systematic search for improvements and improvement at critical points and exceed performance.
The directors of Ford have not known or been able to commit themselves in the search for the Six “F”, in such a way that the adjustments to the needs of the demand have prevented them from reducing costs, this is mainly due to the lack of flexibility and a correct flow in your processes. On the other hand, they have not reached levels of quality “at the first” (fidelity) that allow them to considerably reduce their levels of reprocessing and waste.
Finally, the fundamentals, reliability and strength of its internal processes have hindered it from obtaining a higher Internal Rate of Return for the medium and long term.
One of the ways to reduce costs in the short term has been the drastic reduction of personnel, a procedure that has led him to lose more muscles than fat, since the loss of competent personnel, the loss of developments in individual learning curves, and the high degree of collective demotivation, end up generating an opposite effect to the one sought.
Despite the years that have passed, Ford managers have not been able to assimilate the concepts that Deming provided in his day, nor the challenges that Japanese automakers have been generating for him since the end of the 1970s.
As for the need to produce wheels with lower fuel consumption, it is something that had been looming for a long time, and already in this regard Toyota, Honda and Nissan among other Japanese automakers through kaizen have been systematically and continuously reducing the energy consumption both in production and in the operation of their cars. Precisely this policy and strategy allowed Toyota to produce profits after the crisis of the '70s, when American and European companies only added numbers in red in their results tables. The lower consumption of energy and resources in manufacturing allowed lower costs, and producing wheels with lower fuel consumption made its models more demanded of consumers, due to lower prices, higher quality and lower fuel consumption.All of them very good reasons to lean towards Toyota wheels.
Thus, despite the years that have passed, the Toyota Production System continues to set the pace in terms of production. Being the Kaizen and Just in Time systems that give it life applicable to different activities. The urgent need to improve the management and consumption of resources leads all industries to look for new and better ways to use resources that are increasingly expensive and limited. Without a doubt, Kaizen is the solution to such vicissitudes.
