Comments on Lean Blog: Hyundai's Definition of Quality

I would like to share a little perspective on Hyun...

2006-12-27T19:07:00.000-06:00

I would like to share a little perspective on Hyundai. They are in fact pursuing the Toyota Production System aggressively. This is quite a statement, because the Koreans and Japanese are not always best of friends. They are working very hard at it, and know they have a long way to go, but feel they can close the gap quickly (which is optimistic, obviously). Until they get there, they need to make sure they protect the customer. They have a quality PERCEPTION problem with their customers, so they have had to make sure nothing bad gets to the customers. They only way to contain the problem is through inspection, and so they are aggressively trying to do that well (many do it, but do it poorly) by inspecting the right stuff at the right time. You can't criticize Hyundai for not being Toyota yet, and shouldn't for doing the right thing as they effort to close the gap from where they CURRENTLY are to where they ASPIRE to be.

Same was true at the BMW plant in South Carolina. ...

2006-12-25T12:02:00.000-06:00

Same was true at the BMW plant in South Carolina. Little evidence of lean methods and they bragged about how many inspections the car went through. That resonates better with the general public than it does with lean folks.

Three years ago I had the opportunity to tour the ...

2006-12-24T10:59:00.000-06:00

Three years ago I had the opportunity to tour the Corvette Assembly Plant in Kentucky. GM assembles 250 cars a day on that line and I was surprised to see that 30% to 50% of the cars were routed to repair cells at the end of the assembly process. Inspection and rework account for the quality of almost half of the vehicles that get shipped.

I lost my desire to own a Vette on that day. I would prefer an old version Saturn that was made correctly, not fixed to pass inspection.

I don't know if I'd be as generous as calling a re...

2006-12-23T14:56:00.000-06:00

I don't know if I'd be as generous as calling a reliance on inspection as a "local optima" that would lead to "great" quality. Not only is the inspection approach more labor intensive, I'd argue that the resulting quality isn't as good as building quality in through the lean methods.