Harley-Davidson’s Just-in-Time (JIT) Journey Essay

Case SummaryThis case is about the Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. After World War II, they faced with competition from Nipponese companies, which were able to produce better quality motorcycles at comparatively unhorse woo. Harley-Davidson found that there were three most important practices of Japanese companies, which secernate their production put to work from that of others JIT manufacturing, employee involvement, and statistical process control. Harley-Davidson adopted those three principles and hypothesise different strategies to make this move possible and to make its manufacturing processes as in force(p) as that of its Japanese counterparts. The company finally succeeded in achieving its goals of reducing the cost of production, improving quality, and increasing its market share. With the company a assimilate keepting into backbreaking times, this case presents how it was trying to focus on continuous value in a bid to bring its elf back into profits. Question 1 wherefore has continuous advance been so successful at Harley Davidson? Continuous improvement is ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can assay incremental improvement over time or breakthrough improvement all at once.Under continuous improvement, a task or series of tasks were identified as the problem area in the short letter process, manufacturing trading operations, and product development where improvement could be made. Harley-Davidson required the active connection and commitment of its employees to help in eliminating unnecessary steps and complexity for the process and to bring more flexibleness into the system. Continuous improvement helped the company target savings opportunities and put those mechanisms into places, also improved the quality standards and the reduced the lavishness in the forms of cost, time and defects. Therefore with a year, all Harley-Davidsons manufacturing operations were being converted to JIT components and sub-assemblies were pulled through the production system in answer to final demand. Question 2 Considering the road ahead, what specific actions can Harley Davidson memorise that will move them toward their goals? Harley Davidson could keep doing continuous improvement. Take a enveloping(prenominal) look at its operations in a bid to get its cost structure right and manage shipments consistent with the expected retardent of consumer spending.For continuous improvement, its begins with identify the current process and take a vote on which process would most benefit from improvement, then role out the existing process using a project roueup like A3 report. After fully understand the process, identify areas of opportunity skirt the mapped process, to do this teams should analyze the current process and scrutinize areas that may be streamlined. Finally, the team will decide on a new process. In order to reduce excess capacity or costs and g ain efficiencies, the company has consolidated some of its production facilities, and parts, accessories and general merchandise dispersion operations to improve its overall process. The company also made it a high priority to manage supply in line with demand. In addition, the company started restructuring its production process to reduce complexity and create the flexibility to produce multiple product families on the same assembly line every day at the beginning of 2009.