This case is about the Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation for Harley-Davidson Electric motor Company. After World War II, they faced with competition via Japanese firms, which were capable of produce better quality motorcycles in comparatively cheaper. Harley-Davidson discovered that there are three most crucial practices of Japanese companies, which differentiated their production process from that of others: JIT manufacturing, employee involvement, and statistical process control.
Harley-Davidson adopted individuals three rules and developed different ways to make this approach possible and to help make it its developing processes as efficient because that of their Japanese equivalent.
The company finally succeeded in achieving its goals of reducing the price of production, increasing quality, and increasing their market share. With all the company once again getting into hard times, this case shows how it absolutely was trying to give attention to “continuous improvement” in a bid to bring by itself back into income. Question #1: Why features continuous improvement been and so successful at Harley Davidson?
Continuous improvement is ongoing effort to further improve products, services or procedures.
These types of efforts can easily seek “incremental” improvement as time passes or “breakthrough” improvement at the same time. Under constant improvement, a job or number of tasks had been identified as the situation area in the commercial process, developing operations, and product development where improvement could be made. Harley-Davidson required the active engagement and determination of its employees to aid in reducing unnecessary measures and intricacy for the procedure and to provide more overall flexibility into the system.
Continuous improvement helped the company identify financial savings opportunities and set those components into places, also superior the quality standards and the lowered the spend in the kinds of cost, time and defects. Therefore with a 12 months, all Harley-Davidson’s manufacturing businesses were being converted to JIT: parts and sub-assemblies were “pulled” through the development system in response to last demand. Query #2: With the road ahead, what specific actions may Harley Davidson take that could move all of them toward all their goals? Harley Davidson can keep doing “continuous improvement.
Have a closer take a look at its functions in a wager to obtain its cost framework right and manage deliveries consistent with the expected slowing of consumer spending. For ongoing improvement, really begins with identify the current process and take a election on which method would most benefit from improvement, then create the existing procedure using a project board like A3 report. After completely understand the process, identify areas of opportunity surrounding the mapped procedure, to do this teams should examine the current process and study areas that may be streamlined.
Finally, the team is going to decide on a brand new process. In order to reduce surplus capacity or perhaps costs and gain efficiencies, the company provides consolidated some of its development facilities, and parts, equipment and general merchandise circulation operations to boost its total process. The corporation also achieved it a high goal to manage source in line with require. In addition , the business started reorganization, rearrangement, reshuffling its creation process to lessen complexity and create the flexibleness to produce multiple product households on the same manufacturing plant every day at the start of 2009.
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