I used to be a QC engineer, and we used statisitical process control. Just saying you are going to use it doesn’t mean much. What processes do you chart? How do you react to issues that come up? You might say to chart everything, but then all the machine operators need to know how to do it and what to do when something goes out of control. It might be something they can control, but it might not be. It could be manufacturing practices that they don’t set, but have to live with anyway. And in case you missed it, Ford, GM, and Chrysler are all ISO-9000 certified; many of their suppliers are as well. Maybe you should get out of the classroom and into the facotry.
Absolutely. But at what cost? Military vehicles are designed to handle extreme service and have an extraordinary phalanx of tests they go through to meet MIL-SPEC requirements.
You make my point well. The idea that GM or Ford is incapable of matching or exceeding Toyota/Honda in quality is untrue. It’s a corporate decision where funds will be allocated during production. As we have argued many times before, and you engineers I hope will back me up, that failure rates are a part of commercial product designed and reliability of parts must be inline with product expectation. Don’t expect parts on a Focus to be much more reliable than that of a Crown Vic, even if it cost no more to do so.
My conversations with engineers at local area subcontractor for both American and Asian manufactures has convinced me of that when superior parts at no extra cost were offered to and rejected by some manufacturers.
Agree that reliability is part of the “design philosophy”. Honda specifies Six Sigma quality in their parts, and designs their own stuff for very long life and to tight statistical standards.
For product excelence you need (1) design excellence and (2)manufacturing excellence, combined with ease of maintenance (maintainability) and good dealer training. The early VW beetles had a good deal of all of these for their time, hence the success where other foreign cars failed.
Toyota wrote the book on product design and manufacturing excellence and the Toyota manufacturing system has been copied worldwide. Two retired Toyota engineers saved Porsche from bankruptcy by completely overhauling their manufacturing system and cost control.
There is a book in your library called “Quality is Free” written by an American. The theme is that if quality is built into the total syatem, there is very little waste and very few defects, so the product ends up being cheaper to manuafacture, and the low warranty claims increase profits even further.
yes that may be, but, these people testing these cars have been driving only the best for a long time, and therefore when testing a lower end vehicle that most of America will own, their opinions will be skewed towards wanting something “better”, and they will notice things that nobody else would care about, or ever notice.
“Toyota wrote the book on product design and manufacturing excellence and the Toyota manufacturing system has been copied worldwide.”
We have to admit that America at least coauthored the book (William Deming). In my very humble opinion, we were very “end year stock share” driven from the beginning and chose that path for business success measure , quality be damned.
I also have to say , we can’t compete with nations that don’t cut the corners we do in production because of our employer based health care system. To think that doesn’t have a direct affect on loss of jobs, skimping on sound engineering practices and the like, is burying our collective heads in the sand. I see a relationship to all. 30% off the top for some industries in our poor state to provide health care to our populous is a huge deficit to run in competition. Being a border state, it has cost our state, much of it’s wealth when manufacturing and quality in goods ran hand in hand across the border.
We are slowly turning GM/Ford domestic production into Walmarts for cars. Sold here, produced elsewhere with compromised specs; all with inconsistent quality.
Which end of the spectrum do you want your tax dollars to contribute ? Health care and retirement benefits or bail outs. Your choice.
Just to get a little more long winded. Quality in production is related in part to job satisfaction of a companies workers. When workers are tied to jobs because of the benefits they afford to their families accompanied by lack of freedom of movement, quality suffers. Guaranteed, portable health care and retirement benefits tends to encourage the best people to the jobs they prefer which enhances quality work. It’s a no brainer from that perspective.
dagosa; I agree that Edward Deming, the US guru on statistical quality control, was the father of quality manufacturing. However, Toyota turned it into a science for the car industry. US companies have now proven that they can do just as well.
Too bad it took a near-death experience by the industry to realize that the new benchmarks had to be so much higher.
Agree that job satisfaction is very important and Japanese companies in North America focus on teamwork and letting employees make many small decisons.
P.S. Japanese and Korean owned plants in the US have the same good employee-provided health care services for their employees, and also produce world class quality. French, British and Italian plants generally produce mediocre quality cars and all have government funded health care programs!!
“Too bad it took a near-death experience by the industry to realize that the new benchmarks had to be so much higher.”
Which near-death experience are you talking about? Ford has known about this for decades. Their first meaningful experience was with Escort transmissions in the 1980s. There were two plants; one in the US and one in Japan. The Japanese transmissions had almost no failures but the US built untis did not fare as well. Quality control was part of it, but the major difference was geometric dimensioning and tolerancing. GD&T involves knowing the dimensional control limits for each part in an assembly and then assigning tolerances to make sure that they are not exceeded. If you need to know the control limits for every fitted part, the cost is enormous and it takes a very long time to accomplish.
Agree that they were aware of those funny Japanese quality procedures. They just did not believe you needed it to survive in the long run. In the early 80s, during Roger Smith’s reorganization, GM sent a team to Toyota to study their methods. The young men reported that “Toyota has little to offer GM; they have fewer computers and robots and their plants are much smaller”. The concept of “lean manufacturing” totally escaped them!
It did take a long time for the Detroit 3 to realize that people, not computers and robots, were their most important assets!
Whitey, rest assured I’m quite aware of “six sigma.”
However, while there have been otherwise-good cars that were stymied by poor quality control, I was referring to the “bad ol’ days” of the Pinto and Vega with my comment regarding “turn up the reliability factor.” These were cars that were lemons right off the drawing board. Upping the quality control for subcontractors on THOSE cars would be akin to polishing a…rather polish-resistant substance.
The big 3 found out the hard way that knowing how to make 5000#, RWD V8s does not necessarily mean one knows how to make 2000#, FWD I4s.
I think that they take the type of car into acount when they review it. Of course, they would much prefer the CTS-V to just about anything, but I haven’t found the car mags to hold a Yaris to the same standards as a 'Vette.
The hard part is making cost-effective changes that provide better quality.
I think that sums it up. What’s cost effective for one company with one set of priorities may not be for another. Even given the cultural differences, it’s still possible to make a quality product. Remember for years, it was more “cost effective” to build big fins instead of preparing for international competition and giving away the small car market to the VW bug. Too little too late sums GM/Fords/Chrysler attempts in a market where timing is every think. Come to think of it, it is in most.
What’s cost effective for one company with one set of priorities may not be for another. Even given the cultural differences, it’s still possible to make a quality product. Remember for years, it was more “cost effective” to build big fins instead of preparing for international competition and giving away the small car market to the VW bug.
“It did take a long time for the Detroit 3 to realize that people, not computers and robots, were their most important assets!”
Too little too late sums GM/Fords/Chrysler attempts in a market where timing is everything. Come to think of it, it is in most.
When you buy 6 pages of advertising, they are guaranteed to love you…If you give them 6 cars to “test” for a month or more, they positively swoon…But the CTS-V is indeed a cool car, a hot-rod Chevy with leather seats that embarrasses the German competition…
There are a million 1965 Mustangs still on the road. No other manufacturer can say that about their 1965 models…Automobiles are disposable consumer products, NONE of them are designed to last forever…Todays Mustangs hold up as well as any car made…