American factory - Japanese factory

Abstract

There are fashions in the academic world; and they come and go. In the 1980s, it was fashionable to talk about the 'miracle' of Japanese factory management in light of the successful achievement of its 'lean production' methods. Rather belatedly, the world realized that Japanese manufacturing of machinery, especially motor-vehicle production, demonstrated the highest levels of production efficiency, product quality and speed in new model development. Careful field studies discovered that there were indeed differences in managerial practices between Japanese and (say) US factories, which were directly responsible for the significant divergence in economic performances. Notable characteristics peculiar to Japanese machine factories included: (1) a system of parts procurement which drastically reduced inventories of parts and components for both assemblers and parts suppliers; (2) widely adopted total quality control (TQC) operations, which, having originated in the statistical quality control advocated and introduced to Japan by William Edwards Deming, had practically eliminated product defects from Japanese factory sites; and (3) strong networks of parts suppliers, who maintained long-lasting, stable relationships, typically with a single assembler despite a heavy stress on efficiency.' The timing of this intellectual fashion overlapped with the period when Japanese foreign direct investment was on the rise, accelerating awareness in the outside world of the distinct features of Japanese-style factory management. This undoubtedly was an added factor that contributed to heating up the popularity of the subject. The fashion came to a sudden halt, however, when the Japanese economic bubble burst in the early 1990s. In a trice, Japan lost not only a substantial portion of her accumulated wealth, but also