Amrita Arora
S143F0005
Planning for Quality and Productivity
A Nissan Case Study
CASE SYNOPSIS
Nissan
(NMUK) is the UK's largest car manufacturing plant which is located near Sunderland.
In terms of the number of cars produced annually for every person employed, it has been
Europe's most productive car plant for the past seven years.
NMUK handles all aspects of the manufacturing/assembly of the Primera, Micra and
Almera ranges
By the end of 2003, over 70% of its output was exported to 55 markets worldwide.
Four other UK sites:
Nissan Design Europe (NDE) - design teams
Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE) - design and development
Nissan Motor (GB) Ltd (NMGB) - sales & marketing division
Lutterworth Parts Distribution Centre - parts distribution and storage facility
Why Locate in Sunderland?
Skilled labour force - readily available
Communications - good road, rail links and ports
Government support financial and other incentives
Production
Monitor total machine-hours and total labor-hours that each vehicle requires
Production capacity - 500,000 vehicles per year (3 Shifts)
360,000 vehicles per year (2 shifts)
Mass produce standard models, with individual consumer choice being accommodated
by offering various colors, interior designs, and optional extras within a limited flexible
production process
Continuous flow production method, where sub-assemblies are brought together in a
final assembly area.
Most cost effective and efficient method of production
The speed of the final assembly line can be adjusted to match consumer demand
Three main shops are:
body assembly
painting
final assembly
Jobs across three main broad areas:
Flow production
Developing a way of doing things and an attitude towards work based on giving
responsibility to employees at every step. This approach raises employees' morale, and
reduces absenteeism
Employees to become multi-skilled decision makers
Open communication policy
'Going for quality' emphasises 'building good quality in' rather than 'inspecting poor
quality out'
Total Quality Management
making customer satisfaction top priority
creating high quality
'improvement culture'
A cycle of Plan, Do, Check, Action
Just-in-time technology
Specific vehicles and their components are produced just-in-time to meet the demand for
them
The amount of cash tied up in stocks and in work-in-progress is kept to a minimum
Amount of space devoted to costly warehousing
The importance of training
NMUK's training department conducts a training needs analysis to assess individual
employees' needs and to organise training programmes
five main areas:
Technical development
People development
Understanding processes
Computer skills and graduate training
Trainee development
Kaizen
continuous quality improvement
Kaizen improvements can save
money
time
materials
labour effort
as well as improving quality, safety, job satisfaction, and productivity.
NMUK suggestion scheme
Bring out the best in both people and machines
Motorolas Quality Management
Motorolas goal is to make business and life simpler, smarter, synchronized and safer by
creating leadership products and services that put intelligence everywhere. The quality program
has evolved to support this goal and is now a program of Performance Excellence, based on the
Baldrige model. This model demands a commitment to quality across the board--through
visionary leadership, organizational learning, company agility, employee engagement, shrewd
management and a focus on results. While Six Sigma remains at the heart of their internal
processes, their vision has widened to ensure that excellence is permeated through every aspect
of their business.
A target is given to all employees and they are given full autonomy to develop processes to
improve quality. For this they take customer feedback and also analyze the products and
processes. They practically own their processes.
Ant and Lion Story Problems in Quality Management
In startup mode people are happy to work and without monitoring deliver. Then there will be
some missed deliveries and bad quality projects. Management brings in quality experts and
process experts. This is where things start to go bad. Instead of building quality in the product it
becomes another department. Responsibility for quality is with another department. It becomes
a fight between departments. You need more reports and more time in preparing those. It
always results in quality going down. There is a say if you cannot measure it then you cannot
manage it. I agree with this. But most of the time measurements asked by the departments does
not help to improve the quality. They only result in spending more time with applications for
logging defects and marking them as fixed and reviewed.
The quality of a product or service is a customers perception of the degree to which the product or
service meets his or her expectations
