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jammies · 04-14-2009, 01:19 PM

When I was a kid, Japanese autos were just terrible - they were what you bought if you couldn't afford anything North American. So were their electronics. In a space of about 10 years they went from crap to quality, but it took another decade before that was widely known and accepted.

In the same way, the quality measures taken by the Big Three will take a while to affect the buying public's perceptions, although in their case it may be too late when it happens. They should have been challenging the Japanese in the early 80's instead of floundering around for 20 years before acknowledging the problem by changing their processes instead of just their offerings.

As an aside, the difference between Japanese and North American views on quality control was illustrated to me when I took a Toshiba laptop repair course a few years back, and the instructor recounted a story of his training early on in Toshiba's repair programme. When you open up a laptop, there are tiny little cloth/rubber discs that cover the screwholes, which you have to remove to get at the screws. Sometimes in removing them, either the glue sticks to the screw and not the disc, or the disc gets damaged, and you can't re-use them, so the expectation was that you order some of these discs to replace the unusable ones.

Well, head office in Japan called over after a little while, asking the Canadian repair depot why they were ordering so many of these discs, which, apparently, were almost NEVER needed in Japan. The Canadian explanation went back, and the Japanese enquired of their techs why this issue didn't happen to them, and found out that the techs would take a *hairdryer* and carefully remove these 1/10 cent parts after heating them sufficiently that they would come off undamaged every time. Of course, it took a Canadian tech about 10 seconds to remove the 4 discs and the Japanese about 5 minutes, but nothing to me demonstrates the difference between North American "get 'er done and clean up afterwards" attitude and the Japanese attention to detail.

04-14-2009, 01:19 PM	#27
jammies Basement Chicken Choker Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: In a land without pants, or war, or want. But mostly we care about the pants. Exp:	When I was a kid, Japanese autos were just terrible - they were what you bought if you couldn't afford anything North American. So were their electronics. In a space of about 10 years they went from crap to quality, but it took another decade before that was widely known and accepted. In the same way, the quality measures taken by the Big Three will take a while to affect the buying public's perceptions, although in their case it may be too late when it happens. They should have been challenging the Japanese in the early 80's instead of floundering around for 20 years before acknowledging the problem by changing their processes instead of just their offerings. As an aside, the difference between Japanese and North American views on quality control was illustrated to me when I took a Toshiba laptop repair course a few years back, and the instructor recounted a story of his training early on in Toshiba's repair programme. When you open up a laptop, there are tiny little cloth/rubber discs that cover the screwholes, which you have to remove to get at the screws. Sometimes in removing them, either the glue sticks to the screw and not the disc, or the disc gets damaged, and you can't re-use them, so the expectation was that you order some of these discs to replace the unusable ones. Well, head office in Japan called over after a little while, asking the Canadian repair depot why they were ordering so many of these discs, which, apparently, were almost NEVER needed in Japan. The Canadian explanation went back, and the Japanese enquired of their techs why this issue didn't happen to them, and found out that the techs would take a hairdryer and carefully remove these 1/10 cent parts after heating them sufficiently that they would come off undamaged every time. Of course, it took a Canadian tech about 10 seconds to remove the 4 discs and the Japanese about 5 minutes, but nothing to me demonstrates the difference between North American "get 'er done and clean up afterwards" attitude and the Japanese attention to detail. __________________ Better educated sadness than oblivious joy.