Nari Kannan

摘要

It is sad to see the big three icons of US industry -General Motors, Ford and Chrysler - go down the tubes as they have, due to ignoring others' focus on process improvement. Japanese competitors have stolen both the US and the global market. It is not through lack of warning - they had almost three decades! From a high of a 60 to 7 0 per cent market share of the US market, the big three have been reduced to 20 to 30 per cent over the past 30 years. There have been many missteps and reasons for this steady erosion, but a major contributor has been Toyota's continu- ous improvement in its manufacturing processes. In other functions Toyota is as bad as the big three, but in manufacturing, it has steadily improved its process, factory by factory, model by model, increasing flexibility of the assembly lines. It has constantly cut the costs of manufacturing, while improving the quality of the end product. Continuous process improvement provides such a potent weapon that when a competitor wields it for decades, paying lip service to it is inexcusable.