Honda's Swindon factory on two-day week until August
Discussion
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/may/20/hon...
It says the supply of electronic components, engines and brakes are taking longer than expected to return to normal.
Does anyone have any information on how the supply chain works? I presume the engine is made in Japan, but where do the components for the engine come from, are they also manufactured in Japan or do they come from other Far East countries?
It says the supply of electronic components, engines and brakes are taking longer than expected to return to normal.
Does anyone have any information on how the supply chain works? I presume the engine is made in Japan, but where do the components for the engine come from, are they also manufactured in Japan or do they come from other Far East countries?
Guam said:
This is where JIT and over concentration of your supply chain in too few businesses, stuffs you strategicaally.
For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
Yeah, JIT sucks. Perfect example, my local at home, they've tuned their orders to cope with the fact that I work away 5 days a week now, had a weeks holiday recently and I'd drank them out of Carling by saturday night, they had to go scrounging for some more from other pubs! For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
TeamD said:
Guam said:
This is where JIT and over concentration of your supply chain in too few businesses, stuffs you strategicaally.
For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
Yeah, JIT sucks. Perfect example, my local at home, they've tuned their orders to cope with the fact that I work away 5 days a week now, had a weeks holiday recently and I'd drank them out of Carling by saturday night, they had to go scrounging for some more from other pubs! For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
Guam said:
This is where JIT and over concentration of your supply chain in too few businesses, stuffs you strategically.
For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
It will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
Ah, but this is the magical world of Management, where all processes are foolproof, all parts are 100% checked, machines never break down and absolutely NOTHING can go wrong!For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
It will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
Guam said:
This is where JIT and over concentration of your supply chain in too few businesses, stuffs you strategicaally.
For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
For decades? Shouldn't there be endless number of failure stories then? There must be a net gain in not carrying the stock that more than offsets a couple of months of decreased production.For decades multinationals have moved in this direction without consideration of catastrophic failure of the chain.
it will be interesting to see whether this forces a seminal shift in procurement planning in the future?
zac510 said:
For decades? Shouldn't there be endless number of failure stories then? There must be a net gain in not carrying the stock that more than offsets a couple of months of decreased production.
Tell my customers that when a 4 hour hardware support contract results in a 2 day lead time for a chunk of RAM. I don't know how the supplier has the gall to even claim that they could meet their SLAs.Talking to the top man from Infiniti a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that the factory that makes the ECU's is in the restricred area around Fukushima so they are struggling make anything until the factory is open again.
They also lost over 400 vehicles that were washed away from the docks in the tsunami which hasn't help supply.
They also lost over 400 vehicles that were washed away from the docks in the tsunami which hasn't help supply.
itsnotarace said:
Yep
Correct. Swindon assemble the engines for all cars built there. This short working was introduced a few weeks ago. It made the headlines on Sky news and with the typical sensationalist journalism they made out to sound lke Honda were in deep trouble, workers jobs at risk, etc. When it's a Japan problem not Swindon.As an aside Swindon used to source a lot of components in the UK. I used to work for a company that made all the front hubs, discs, rear hubs and rear wheel spindles.
CzechItOut said:
Does anyone have any information on how the supply chain works? I presume the engine is made in Japan, but where do the components for the engine come from, are they also manufactured in Japan or do they come from other Far East countries?
The issue is that the absence of a single component - something as trivial as a resistor or capacitor - can stop a module's production line.Quite a few components are Japanese made, others increasingly from China.
The difficulty comes that, even if you can find products that appear similar, when you factor the component testing/approval regime (PPAP) into the equation it becomes quite difficult to replace your source at short notice. In some cases these approval processes limit a multi-national vendor to supplying from a particular factory.
... and that's before you consider the challenges associated with finding a source given that all other industries will be doing the same if the production plant is out and the fact that suppliers may lack the manpower to suddenly respond to a whole raft of PPAPs. Or even that the market for certain types of components is dominated by a very small number of companies.
zac510 said:
There must be a net gain in not carrying the stock that more than offsets a couple of months of decreased production.
Yes, there are huge benefits from JIT.People forget that these days a car plant doesn't just build thousands of identical cars. Each car is built to an individual specification with endless variations of engine, transmission, air con, interior trim, stereo etc etc. It would be absolutely impossible to hold stock of parts for all of the specifications. Also many bits of the car arrive as "sub-assemblies" rather than "parts" and the complete dashboard is a good example.
I was always amused by the best description of JIT gone wrong - JIT"
Just Too Late
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