Carbon Copies : Autos: While the Big Three close plants, Japanese facilities here hum along. They match the quality of plants at home by duplicating everything from blueprints to procedures.
Here in the very shadow of America’s Motor City, the Japanese are doing something that the Big Three auto makers still find difficult: They are building world-class quality cars with American workers.
Mazda, Japan’s fourth-largest auto company, has built a massive assembly plant in this Detroit suburb that is a virtual carbon copy of its Hofu complex in southwestern Japan--even down to the models that the two plants produce.
Now, Mazda officials in Japan and the United States say, the Flat Rock plant is producing cars that are as good as those coming off the line back home in Japan.
“Our quality is as good or slightly better than that of Hofu,” Jim Bouck, Flat Rock’s manager of quality assurance, states proudly.
Yet Mazda’s success here is hardly unique. It is being repeated all across the United States by every major Japanese auto maker.
Just seven years after the first Japanese car built in America rolled off Honda’s assembly line in Marysville, Ohio, on Nov. 1, 1982, the Japanese now run eight auto assembly plants in the United States.
By the end of 1990, these Japanese “transplant” facilities will have the capacity to build as many as 2 million cars and trucks each year--roughly equal to the number of cars imported directly from Japan. Ominously for Detroit, that is also roughly equal to Chrysler’s entire North American output of cars and trucks.
While some analysts believe that cars built by the Japanese in America are not quite as good as those that still come directly from Japan, most agree that the distinctions are slight and that the Japanese have generally been successful in shifting their production system to the United States.
“I think cars from Japan are a little better, but there isn’t much difference,” said Chris Cedergren, automotive analyst with J. D. Power & Associates, an Agoura Hills research firm that issues highly respected reports on automotive quality. Added William Pochiluk, founder of Autofacts, a Paoli, Pa., automotive research firm, “I don’t believe that a consumer can tell the difference between a Honda from Marysville, Ohio, and one from Sayama, Japan.”
Certainly customers seem to accept the quality of these “Japanese-American” cars, for the transplants have largely avoided the recession that is settling over Detroit. In fact, as the Big Three idle dozens of plants and lay off tens of thousands of workers this winter, the “transplants” are all still running.
Ironically, some of the transplants are run as joint ventures between Japanese and American firms and thus are even building cars for the Big Three--cars like the Ford Probe, Plymouth Laser and Eagle Talon--that are among Detroit’s highest-quality and most distinctive models. For example, Mazda, which is partly owned by Ford, produces the Probe on the same assembly line that produces the Mazda MX6 and Mazda 626 models.
Some transplants that produce cars both for the Japanese and for the Big Three--including Flat Rock--may soon have to slow down their production lines because of the slump in Big Three sales. Yet others are expanding.
Indeed, the transplants are effectively replacing the Big Three facilities that are closing. Honda opened its second U.S. assembly plant, in East Liberty, Ohio, in late December just as Ford and General Motors announced widespread production cutbacks for early 1990, and the new Isuzu-Subaru joint venture in LaFayette, Ind., opened just as Chrysler announced that it was permanently closing a big plant in Detroit.
How have the Japanese managed to bring high-quality car production to the United States, virtually overnight?
They have done it in an elegantly simple way, industry officials say. Many clone their Japanese operations, down to the smallest detail and then just move everything to America.
First, they take one of their plants in Japan and copy its blueprints; many of their new American facilities are exact replicas of assembly plants back home. Flat Rock, for instance, was copied after Mazda’s Hofu plant, while Toyota’s new plant in Georgetown, Ky., which builds the Camry compact model, is the very image of Toyota’s Tsutsumi assembly plant in Toyota City, Japan, which also produces the Camry. Honda’s new East Liberty plant is copied after one of Honda’s assembly operations in its massive complex in Suzuka, Japan.
Reproducing their Japanese plants made it possible for the Japanese companies to call more directly on the experience of the managers and engineers who were brought over from Japan to help start their American operations.
“Designing a new facility as a mirror image of one in Japan helps a great deal in problem solving,” observed Mike Dodge, Toyota’s plant manager in Georgetown.
But the cloning process went beyond bricks and mortar. Toyota and Mazda actually wrote detailed descriptions of each assembly-line job in the Japanese plants that they were cloning and then created the same jobs and workstations in their new U.S. plants, only modifying the jobs slightly to better fit American workers.
“We were able to establish standardized work procedures, a kind of written choreography of each assembly job, based on the way it is done at Tsutsumi,” Dodge said. “We took a written choreography of each assembly-line job from Tsutsumi, and then modified it some to fit Georgetown.”
Later, after hiring its first American workers, Toyota sent 500 of them to train at Tsutsumi for four weeks. “When the people came back from Japan, they had a feeling for what we were talking about when we talked about the Toyota production system,” Dodge added.
Meanwhile, Mazda spent a year writing a book-length description of its Hofu assembly process before beginning work on its Flat Rock plant.
“First, the book described the overall Mazda production system, and then it was broken down to describe each shop and section in Hofu,” noted Takashi Itoh, Mazda’s vice president for manufacturing at Flat Rock. “We took every item, everything that Mazda was doing, and charted it to see if it was something we could do in the United States.”
In addition, the Japanese were able to pick and choose from among the best workers America had to offer when it came time to introduce Japanese production systems here. Eager to work for a stable and profitable company, 200,000 people inquired about jobs at Toyota’s Georgetown plant, while Mazda received nearly 100,000 applications for 3,500 jobs at Flat Rock.
While there has been some dissent among workers at Flat Rock and other transplants since they opened, the Japanese managers now say there is very little difference between American and Japanese factory workers. That seems to prove once and for all that labor has had little to do with the quality problems of the Big Three.
“American workers take their jobs very seriously, and work very hard,” Itoh said. “If they are properly managed, there is no reason to have the product be any less than what it is in Japan.”
In moving here, the Japanese were also helped by the fact that they do so much early planning while they are designing cars. They try to develop and engineer cars so that potential problems are solved long before the cars actually make it to the factory floor.
Japanese companies make a point of developing new models that are easy for workers to build--cars that are tightly engineered so that parts fit together properly the first time. Production workers are actually brought into the design process to advise engineers on how to make parts that are simple to assemble.
“If our designers worked alone, they wouldn’t have that input and know about the needs of manufacturing,” observed Katsuyoshi Yamada, general manager of quality control at Toyota in Japan. “This way, quality is built into the process.”
With quality thus designed in from the beginning, Japanese cars are easier to assemble, no matter whether they are put together in central Japan or the American Midwest.
The development phase, when such easy-to-build designs are planned out, “is where the Japanese system absolutely excels,” Mazda’s Bouck observed.
The key is the Japanese willingness to spend months, early in the development phase, plotting solutions to potential problems. American companies, by contrast, usually spend less time in such early planning and more time trying to solve problems later, once the cars have reached the assembly line.
“The Japanese spend more time planning, and their plans are much more concrete and complete than in an American company,” said Bouck, who previously worked at General Motors.
“You know--when you start out on something in a Japanese company--exactly what you are supposed to accomplish, and you are given clear targets to meet,” he added. “That is a big difference from American companies.”
With specific tasks exactly spelled out in written form, the Japanese production system can be rapidly transferred, even to brand-new workers in a foreign country.
“The system itself is so well defined that you could implement it in Japan, here or in Europe,” Bouck said.
“There’s no magic to it,” he added. “It’s just that all the pieces of the system fit together so well. They have planned it all out ahead of time.
“And so once you translate all of your documents to English, you are doing it in America.”
THE ASIAN TRANSPLANTS Midwest and South MITSUBISHI/CHRYSLER (Diamond Star) Bloomington, Ill. Produces: Plymoth Laser, Eagle Summit and Talon, Mitsubishi Eclipse Employees: 2,900 Capacity: 240,000
SUBARU/ISUZU Lafayette, Ind. Produces: Suburu cars, Isuzu trucks Employees, 2,200 Capacity: 169,000
NISSAN Smyrna, Tenn. Produces: Sentra cars and pickups Employees: 5,000 Capacity: 440,000 (1992 estimate)
MAZDA Flat Rock, Mich. Produces: Ford Probe, Mazda 626 and MX-6 Employees: 3,500 Capacity: 240,000
HONDA Marysville and East Liberty, Ohio Produces: Accord, Civic Employees: 6,100 Capacity: 510,000
TOYOTA Georgetown, Ky. Produces: Camry Employees: 3,500 (projection) Capacity: 200,000
Canada HONDA Alliston, Ontario Produces: Civic Employees: 800 Capacity: 80,000
GM/SUZUKI (Cami) Ingersoll, Ontario Produces: Suzuki Sidekick and Swift, Geo Metro and Tracker Employees: 2,000 Capacity: 200,000
HYUNDAI Bromont, Quebec Produces: Sonata Employees: 1,300 Capacity: 100,000
TOYOTA Cambridge, Ontario Produces: Corolla Employees: 1,000 Capacity: 50,000
California TOYOTA/GENERAL MOTORS (Nummi) Fremont, Calif. Produces: Chevrolet Geo Prizm, Toyota Corolla, pickup Employees: 3,500 Capacity: 340,000
Source: Auto companies, Detroit News
