Happy new year! Welcome to 2024.
Every new year brings a chance to re-start. I would like to urge you to do things right the first time.
In his classic “The Machine That Changed the World” Jim and his team spent years traveling the world in the 1960s looking at the biggest manufacturing effort ever undertaken by humans: making cars.
He wanted to figure out why some companies made cars faster and with fewer defects than other companies. By now, any rational manufacturer uses what Jim decided to call Lean manufacturing, but back then things were different.
One of the biggest differences between manufacturers was in the luxury-car market. In Japan, such companies as Toyota, Honda, and Nissan spent an average of 16.8 hours making a luxury car. Parts went in at one end of the factory, and, about 17 hours later, a Lexus emerged. And they had 34 defects per hundred vehicles. Not bad.
In Europe, though, the story was different. Such companies as Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW took 57 hours to make a car, and they had 78.7 defects for every hundred vehicles.
Why did it take the Europeans so long? And why so many defects?
BMW isn’t exactly known for making crappy cars. Here’s why: In a Toyota plant when a problem shows up on the line, every worker has the ability to stop the whole line. When that happens, everyone swarms around where the line stopped—not to yell at the guy for stopping the line, but to fix whatever problem is there. They don’t want any cars coming out the other end with things that have to be fixed.
They fix the problem once, and it’s solved forever. If they don’t, that same defect could go into hundreds of vehicles.
Conversely, the BMW German plants were expending more effort to fix the problems it had just created than the Japanese plant required to make a nearly perfect car the first
time.
You read that right. The Germans spent more time fixing a car they’d just made. This is called fire fighting or wastage of productive time in the workplace.
Do things right the first time doesn’t mean you make mistakes but it means once you identify the problem, fix it a system level so you don’t have to look at it again.
See you on 27 January 2024
Investor, Advisor and Coach with Expertise in: Go To Market and Business Dev. Strategies, Talent Acquisition Strategies and Fundraising Strategies.
3moCongrats to the Electra team for a very successful 1st day at Move 2024 in London where Electra was the the first and only company to ever to showcase in a vehicle its unique Range Expert providing the driver remaining range on their battery within 1 or 2% accuracy and for showcasing Fleet Analytics predicting battery failures months before the failure occur, eliminating any downtime due to battery issues. Congratulations for the entire team at Electra for playing such a major role advancing the future of transportation.