Suppliers and manufacturers

Interesting piece in our paper this morning: auto-industry suppliers are
working hard at *improving* the quality of the stuff they supply to
Toyota and Honda, but only *maintaining* the quality of the stuff they
provide to the Big Three -- because the latter treat suppliers as
adversaries rather than as partners.

MB

 

Which is all very strange (but true) since the whole time the U.S.
automakers were developing these new "quality" systems and "supplier"
relationships, supposedly they were incorporating things that had been
"learned from the Japanese". Instead what we got was the invention of
"Lopezing" and "PICOS" (i.e., clever systems on how to screw the
supplier without them realizing it until it was too late).

Bill Putney
(to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with "x")

 

Course that might also be that the quality of stuff they supply to the
big three is already good enough, and the quality of stuff they supply to
Toyota
and Honda has been abysmal.

Consider that Chrysler isn't domestically owned any longer, does it really
qualify as a big three anymore?

There are many parts that you cannot just keep improving and improving and
improving the quality on forever. Unless of course your regularly in the
habit
of letting the quality go into the toilet then improving it when people
carped.

It reminds me of 20 years ago when I worked in a machine shop for a couple
summers. We had 2 main bolt suppliers, Beaver Bolt, and Portland Screw.
The black steel bolts from both were pretty much the same. The galvanized
stuff was something else. The BB galvanized stuff was terrible, extra
galvanizing
material coming off it, etc. The Portland Screw stuff was really clean.
You
can probably guess which supplier was cheaper. And you can probably guess
which supplier we used the most of. We would use BB until the quality got
so awful that we would then go buy a whole pallet of Portland Screw bolts,
then call in the Beaver Bolt salesman and point to the pallet and say
"that's
what we are going to be buying in the future unless you get your crap
together"
Then Beaver Bolt quality would improve greatly, for the next few orders,
then
start sliding again until we got so sick of working with it that we would
have
to repeat the song and dance again.

Unfortunately for both suppliers, that machine shop closed down years ago,
due to corporate acquisition as you might expect. Both suppliers are still
in
business, although Beaver Bolt has renamed itself to Distribution Dynamics.
I suspect that even 20 years ago, neither of these suppliers actually
manufactured
their bolts, they probably ordered them out of China.

Ted