During the past decade, Japan’s major source of competitive advantage in the global automotive industry has been its ability to bring new, high-quality products rapidly to market. Simultaneously designing a product and its manufacturing system (often referred to as concurrent or simultaneous engineering of overlapping tasks) is generally seen as the salient characteristic of this competitive edge; Toyota, the most successful Japanese automotive company, is credited as one of the originators of concurrent engineering (CE).1 To compete, U.S. companies have implemented CE, largely through organizational design, creating highly structured design processes and multifunctional, often collocated, design teams, with intense communication among team members, including supplier engineers.2 Several U.S. companies (most notably, Chrysler and Ford) have reduced the length of the product development cycle, in part through such organizational changes.3
Our research has found, however, that Toyota uses a relatively unstructured development process, its multidisciplinary teams are neither collocated nor dedicated, and, in the case of suppliers, Toyota communicates intensively about product development with a smaller portion of its supply base than do U.S. auto companies (but Toyota suppliers give their customer higher marks for communication effectiveness than U.S. suppliers give their automakers). Moreover, while in most cases CE seeks to freeze specifications quickly, Toyota’s engineers and managers try to delay decisions and provide their suppliers with... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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