Sep 7, 2009
Why Japanese factories work (Hayes, 1981)
Why Japanese factories work (Hayes, 1981)
In the past Westerners pictured the Japanese factory as an inefficient sweatshop. Now, it is the epitome of futuristic manifacturing success in their eyes. Both of these generalizations are wrong – the Japanese factory is “the factory of today running as it should”, consistently doing simple things well. This article focuses on Japanese management of manufacturing through the eyes of Hayes.
> What I Did Not See
- Greater technological advancement and automation.
- Longer running times for machines.
- Quality circles as influential as they are believed to be in the West.
- Uniform compensation systems.
> What I Did See
- Creating a clean, orderly workplace
Clean, organized and quiet factories resulting from the attitudes, actions and processes put in place by plant managers and the responsibility of workers. This was all geared towards breakdown of equipment.
- Eliminating ‘the root of all evil’ (inventory)
No inventory on the factory floor. ‘Just in time’ style practices.
- Keeping Murphy out of the plant – Determination to keep things from going wrong.
(1) Preventing machine overload: Machines operated at slower than normal speeds, and for less time. Regular and thorough maintenance.
(2) Monitoring systems: Monitoring and early warning systems allow workers to oversee a greater number of machines than American workers.
(3) No-crisis atmosphere: Production schedules determined in advance but not from theory. Urgent changes are not possible (esp. with no inventory). Maybe American managers enjoy crisis, but for Japanese crises are evidence of failure.
> Management and Manufacturing
What is important is how managers view their roles and responsibilities.
- ‘Pursuing the last grain of rice’
It took 25 years of hard work for the Japanese to become the force that they are. They are intelligent, careful and never satisfied (e.g. the concept of ‘zero defects’).
‘Thinking quality in’ by:
(1) Planning: Production is part of a ‘total product-process system’
(2) Training
(3) Feedback: As opposed to the ‘we against them’ worker-manager relations in the West, Japanese managers and employees work together to find and solve problems.
(4) Materials: Intensive screening of inputs and close relationships with suppliers.
Benefits: In a country as densely populated as Japan it is necessary to have very low defect rates because word of mouth spreads quickly. Manufacturers realize that increasing quality leads to increasing productivity.
- Time consciousness
Emphasis on long-term commitments.
Partnership (relationships with everlasting customers): Japanese companies think in terms of ‘codestiny’, the American approach is very different.
Lifetime employment: In practice, only very large, international companies practice this and even they dilute it by the use of subcontractors. For these companies, lifetime employees are expensive human capital – they undergo a lot of training and development and are looked upon as ‘experts’ by management. Americans have deskilled their workforce through automation, the Japanese have paired highly-skilled workers with highly automated machines.
- Equipment independence
Japanese companies often manufacture equipment in-house so that their machines match their needs exactly – this also results in lower costs and faster delivery times.
> Re-Solving ‘The Problem of Production’
American companies have favoured specialists in areas other than manufacturing because they have implicitly believed that they have “solved the problem of production”. This ahev hurt competitiveness in recent years when competing against the Japanese, who take manufacturing very seriously. Japanese methods shoudl be able to work in the U.S. (and the things mentioned in this article are not actually so foreign to American culture).
Original Text:
Hayes, R.H. (1981). Why Japanese factories work. Harvard Business Review, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 57-66.
