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Circumstance Summary The case is about the Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation in Harley-Davidson Motor unit Company. After World War II, that they faced with competition from Japanese companies, which are able to generate better quality motorbikes at relatively lower cost.
Harley-Davidson found that there were three most important practices of Japanese companies, which usually differentiated their particular production process from that of others: JIT manufacturing, employee engagement, and record process control. Harley-Davidson implemented those three principles and formulated distinct strategies to makes move feasible and to make the manufacturing techniques as effective as that of its Japanese people counterparts. The corporation finally been successful in reaching its goals of lowering the cost of creation, improving quality, and increasing its market share.
With the company again engaging in hard times, this situatio presents how it was aiming to focus on “continuous improvement” within a bid to get itself into profits. Problem #1: How come has constant improvement recently been so successful at Harley Davidson? Constant improvement can be ongoing effort to improve items, services or perhaps processes. These types of efforts can easily seek “incremental” improvement over time or “breakthrough” improvement at one time.
Under constant improvement, a task or number of tasks had been identified as the challenge area in the industry process, manufacturing operations, and product development where improvement could be made. Harley-Davidson required the active contribution and determination of it is employees to assist in eliminating unnecessary actions and complexness for the procedure and to provide more overall flexibility into the system. Continuous improvement helped the organization identify personal savings opportunities and put those mechanisms into spots, also superior the quality criteria and the reduced the spend in the varieties of cost, time and defects.
As a result with a year, all Harley-Davidson’s manufacturing procedures were being converted to JIT: pieces and sub-assemblies were “pulled” through the production system in answer to last demand. Problem #2: Considering the road ahead, what specific actions can Harley Davidson take which will move all of them toward their particular goals? Harley davidson Davidson can keep doing “continuous improvement. ” Take a better look at their operations within a bid to get its expense structure correct and deal with shipments like expected decreasing of customer spending.
Pertaining to continuous improvement, it’s starts with identify the current method and require a vote on which process could most gain from improvement, in that case map out the existing process by using a project table like A3 report. After fully understand the procedure, identify parts of opportunity surrounding the planned process, to get this done teams should analyze the current process and scrutinize areas that may be efficient. Finally, the team will determine a new procedure. In order to reduce excess potential or costs and gain efficiencies, the corporation has consolidated some of the production services, and parts, accessories and general merchandise distribution procedures to improve the overall procedure.
The company likewise made it a higher priority to manage supply in line with demand. In addition , the company began restructuring its production method to reduce complexness and make the flexibility to produce multiple item families on a single assembly line daily at the beginning of 2009.
