MC: Jones is a very sophistcated and clever man, author of thought-provoking
posts. But he can missd the point in a very complex subject.
People in general, including Jones, do the best they can within the vision
that they have and organizations they work for.
----- <snip>
...even through in fairness, let me say for the record
that I have truncated Lawrence's complete sentence
from his posting, in order to make a point that the
shorter sentiment which posted above (which is not
exactly what he meant) is perilously misguided, and
terribly counter-productive to the USA in the long
run.
MC: The rhetoric is a bit strong here. The world learned from the US, and we
should be learning from the world.
One wonders if the those dedicated manufacturing
engineers at GM were "doing the best they can" when
they killed the EV-1 ?
MC: Off the wall. Not related to "manufacturing engineering". The EV-1 was
in a sense a half-hearted effort by GM and had no real future other than as
an expensive commuter car. Toyota gets full credit for the vision thing, but
they started from the ground up in designing the Prius, including their own
semiconductor facility to ge the electronics they needed. An eight-wheel
motor-in-wheels super car was built in Japan which out-performs the elite
European sports car -- with a fortune in lithium ion batteries. GM
*management* made seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time decisions.
... or when they went out of
their way to proclaim- when Toyota introduced the
Prius, that Detroit would never make that kind of
foolish mistake. Over and over, Lutz and Company (also
Ford) tried to denigrate Toyota's visionary effort as
little more than a "money losing gimmick"
MC: Lutz is *mamagement* not engineering.
Don't get me wrong - it takes lots of manufacturing
engineers to make things work well and at the lowest
cost, but those engineers are often in that particular
job position because they are willing to forego the
cutting edge, or lack creativity, but are adapted best
to focus on the mundane, and the tried-and-true.
MC: Balderdash. The need to get things right nearly 100% of the time makes
one very conservative. Traditional US manufacturing structure has design
engineers making drawings for a factory to reproduce, with the
"manufacturing egineers" at the bottom of the stack trying to build what is
on the drawings. When I went to college in the '40s, "Industrial
Engineering" was at the bottom of the heap, beneath the 'real engieers' --
studying time-and-motion assembly opertions. The concept of "design for
manufacture" with the manufacturing engineers involved in the design process
is relatively new and forced on US industry by the success of firms like
Toyota. Toyota [and much of Asia], in turn, learned much from the American
Edwards Deming, who brought statistical qualtiy control to Japan after WW2.
MC: In my experience with the early days of robotics, it became evident that
you don't just substitute a robot for a human. One may have to rethink and
redesignt the whole manufacturing process to use robotics -- the resistance
often came not for the workers but from middle management. Deming refuse to
consult with anyone lower than the CEO, for his head had to be turned first,
to reshape the company.
In reality - if you want to grow a company to its
maximum potential, especially in a competitive
industry, it takes both "camps" - the manufacturing
engineer and the visionary creative types, and in
equal measure, to succeed.
MC: Do not denigrate "manufacturing engineering". In Japan, that is an
esteemed title earned by a highly educated and experienced individual.
Design engineers can play with paper and models, but the manufacturing
engineers are the ones who daily deal variability and Murphy and Mother
Nature.
Toyota has that. Ford and GM, in contrast, are
companies which are dominated by manufacturing
engineers who are "Peter-Principled" into the required
creative or visionary slots, and in which they cannot
serve well.
MC: Those engineers are constrained by the need to get high productivity.
The can be very visionary. The domination is by the marketing, styling,
accounting and other inputs as to *what* should be built. They are also
cosntrained by the structure of the factories as to *what* can be built.
The results take are now becoming evident. Toyota is
reaping the benefits of its balanced vision,
risk-taking and creativity. And its best factories, by
its own admission (interms of quality) are in the USA.
MC: US workers are good. They need good management, better than that
provided by the strained relationaship between the unions and managment at
the traditional car companies.
Therefore, it is my contention that it is not our
(USA) workers who are slacking, or our unions, but it
is our short-sighted upper level management, dominated
by too many accountants, MBAs and "manufacturing
engineers" and too few creative visionaries, who are
to blame.
MC: Leave the "manufacturing engineers" out of it. You don't know that
world. "Creative visionaries" don't have meet budgets or deadlines or make a
hundred thousand complex devices all work.
GM and Ford are sinking fast, and will be lucky to
survive the next decade, if they cannot rectify this
upper level management problem fast enough.
MC: All this is the virtue of competition. I once had a Ford Taurus that
cost a thousand per year in repairs of cheap things that were expensive to
fix. I now have to Toyota Camrys, each with well over 100,000 miles, dealer
maintained, and doing very well, thank you.
Mike Carrell
Jones
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