From 1900 onwards, as early as the early 20th century, when many U.S. plants have a lot of low-skilled workers, they can only do some simple operations and repetitive operations are usually piece-workers, for example, the process of his production process 1. Process 2 Process 3. The production cycle takes weeks, sometimes even more than a month's time. In many places the workshop inventory, I saw a similar situation in many Chinese factories.
Ford was the world's largest manufacturers, in 1910 they did some experiments, they used a continuous production line approach by which improved the efficiency of their production fourfold. This mode of production greatly reduced inventory, production processes more quickly. During World War II, the U.S. military has created a very interesting training method called TWI, TWI plant uses a method of using this method to fill the church in charge of how the work processes, training new workers, education workers to comply with the new rules of the process, not just for training competent, but also for ordinary workers, so that they have a method to assess their productivity, and see how to help them improve production efficiency. TWI method is very useful, but the post-war American industry has entered a golden age, a lot of demand, not a lot of competition, there is no great pressure to control costs, so there is no thinking American industry to continue to improve themselves, they forget the TWI This is such a useful training methods, nor very hard to improve themselves.
At the same time, during the 1950s to the 1970s, many factories in Japan, especially Toyota TWI training methods adopted this American invention, in practice many factories are this way, and they get inspiration from the Ford Motor Company, They used a production line approach greatly increases their productivity. By the 1970s, 1980s, many Japanese cars are manufactured in Japan, higher quality compared to its American product quality, lower cost.
Under the Japanese competition in the context of how American factories react?
U.S. factories are not the same reactions, each plant has its own set of practices, the U.S. company said Japanese companies this approach is very interesting, so that they learn from the Japanese company of some good practices and ideas to improve themselves, so as to enhance their competitiveness. GM's approach is completely different, he said, the Japanese car cheaper than us, then so be it, we put it in our fully automated factory, General Motors bought a lot of robots, General Motors to invest in the early 1980s, when a total of $ 15 billion to buy a lot of robots, but also created a lot of robots, its purpose is to replace employees with robots, I hope most of the work is done by robots to complete, but after this practice over a period of time they are completely terminated because they think operating costs through automation and robots is no reduction.
Look at conditions in Chinese factories, Chinese factories also hope to strengthen their automation efforts, many Chinese factories factory bosses want to use the machine as much as possible rather than artificial, but this approach is not the right approach, as in this example just GM, whether to buy a large number of machines can help you reduce costs? actually the answer is not so simple. Even with this machine you can reduce the number of low-skilled workers, but you have to spend more money to pay higher wages Please engineers, operating machinery, if the machine is broken and machine maintenance engineer must do they do not lower the cost.
Also to be produced by this machine, then have someone look at the machine, if the machine going to produce a defective monitor or dignitaries to monitor the production process of the machine. The fully automated plant will provide a competitive advantage? Answer is not so simple sometimes even fully automated operation is destroyed advantage.
If the Chinese have a fully automated factory in France also has a fully automated factories are fully automated, and did not ask the cost of workers, then the price, the speed may have almost the same, in which case it is possible for the French importer to buy from a fully automated factory in France more cost-effective and reasonable. If the plant has a very large fully automated machines, generally used for large-scale production, this time you can not also take small orders, so that you lose a lot of flexibility in the factory.
