To: Ann Festiva, Manager
From: Wei Li (Karen)
Date: April 8, 2014
Subject: Opinions on Increasing Factories Efficiency and Productivity
While Ford is experiencing an increasingly fierce competition in our targeted
market, our management and production efficiency is expected to be enhanced.
According to the recent episode from “American life” program, the NUMMI (New
United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated) model that operated by General
Motor (GM) has once brought GM success and improvement by enabling its
employees to study Toyota’s skills and management. However, the successful
pattern is hard to replicate in other GM plants due to GM employee’s reluctance
toward change and NUMMI model eventually failed. Based on the success and
failure experience of NUMMI model, I suggest Ford’s management pattern and
production process might be improved in the following ways.
IMPROVE PRODUCT QUALITY
Quality and reliability become more and more a concern when our customers
choose a car. Building up reliable and high qualities cars will definitely bring Ford
stronger customer loyalty. Specifically, Ford could define its standard procedures
for how to front line work should be executed and set up a monitor system to
detect the quality of manufacturing of every step including components from the
suppliers in order to let defects flowing down the line ready for repair.
ESTABLISH WORKER TRAINING PROGRAM
Strike has exerted extremely bad impact on NUMMI since no alternative workers
can keep the frontline working during the strike. Thus I suggest Ford should
establish new training program about developing versatile and skillful workers
in case of the absence of certain workforce.
BUILD BETTER CONNECTION BETWEEN MANAGERS AND WORKERS
NUMMI’s failure could largely attribute to the communication problems between
front line workers and managers. In fact, managers should be encouraged to