Asianometry - 2023-11-26
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I worked for a big semiconductor company that got into making calculators in the early seventies. At one time we had a technology exchange meeting with GM. GM was shocked that we simply scrapped an entire unit if it was beyond repair rather than spending valuable man hours to fix it. One of the GM engineers said, "We never scrap anything!" Maybe they should have scrapped some of those parts before they put in my Pontiac 6000.
Texas Instruments 😏
In Canada GM received 6 billion to save manufacturing at a politically important plant (in toronto), during the global financial crisis. GM took that money to pay for labour and when it ran out, they literally closed their operations and made the Canadian government look like retards.
Meanwhile the Japanese moved into Ontario, without subsidies, sourced all of the steel locally, hired local engineers and placed their factories next to some of Canada's best universities. Short story, Honda and Toyota saved Canadian automotive industry, employed Canadians, made great cars, and have amazing relations with the workers without having parasitic unions.
Sadly, a lot of north American manufacturing management and unions were absolutely terrible and thats why soo much manufacturing left
My first car was a Pontiac. I hated that car.
lot of the car oligarchs of the time just didnt understand quality control was paramount.
@@good-tn9srNominal Semidestructor?
On of the things Toyota does best, is it allows it’s assembly personnel to make suggestions on improvements, trials and then implements them if they work
Marketing anti-electric car lies. The other thing Toyota does well. Top 3 climate denier with only oil companies ahead of it.
@@smartelectriccarI'm pro-climate change. Deniers aren't helping sure. But stop taxing oil, protesting pipelines, and start approving fracking permits. The only reason I want an electric is because it's cheap. If we had cheap gasoline we wouldn't need to buy electric cars.
@@theduplicator3270 Fracking does the most damage to the environment permanently and releases more methane than any other human practice
Something Tesla also does incredibly well.
@@smartelectriccarAnti electric? They were the first ones to even bring hybrid and hydrogen to the masses. It’s not that they are anti electric, but they are not stupid like the econuts who thinks there’s enough power and a grid of being able to sustain going completely electric. Toyota has it right to offer a variety while trying to innovate to the next viable thing.
In 2016, when I was studying abroad in Japan, I went on a school trip to a Toyota plant in Aichi prefecture (in the city Toyota, renamed after the car manufacturer). After a whole presentation about the systems implemented, we got a tour through the assembly line. What struck me as most fascinating was how often the line would stop. Sometimes several times a minute you could hear the sound that indicated that someone had pressed the button and the line would stop shortly after. That meant that the line would only move for a few seconds before stopping again. It looked a bit like stop-and-go traffic. But the line would also never stop for long. Workers would only need a few moments to finish whatever work step they were on, and the line started again.
Quality work before quantity work
I work in a Tesla factory and the line doesn't stop unless something breaks or if some critical part isn't stocked
@@nick-zc9xv Didn't Tesla buy the NUMMI plant? Not sure if it's the one you work at. Elon ignores safety in his plants for aesthetics, so I'm not surprised that they don't stop the line.
トヨタの工場見学の他にも多く良い日本での経験をして頂いたのなら嬉しいです！
@@nick-zc9xv No wonder Tesla scores so horribly low on mechanical production quality and longevity of the cars. Various Tesla cars scored worst out of 300 new-ish car models in Sweden when it came to the state of the car once the initial 3-year warranty is over. =/
My father, a former long time GM district service manager, was working for Toyota when the NUMMI plant was new in operation. Everything reported in this video squares with what my father relates to me. He knew Toyota's quality was far superior to the big three of Detroit. It was undeniable, as the warranty claims demonstrated. NUMMI was a test of whether Japan could re-export Deming's quality expertise, originally implemented in Japan after World War II, back to the U.S. They could. And they did. The rest is history.
You mentioned Deming which is interesting because his name rarely comes up in conversation. I worked with associates of Phil Crosby and James Harrington for many years, and I've always been baffled by how little people know about TQM. The principles they taught me, such as Six Sigma, DIRFT and CAPA, have guided me in my career ever since... and I don't even work in manufacturing.
@@joho0 I'm a long retired long-haul truck driver, drove the '48' and Canada. Details aside, I read of Mr. Deming and the other names you noted as well as reading In Search of Excellence in the early 1980s. Fascinating readings. I since have always seen the enormous waste of time, effort and money as the indifferent and oblivious go about their ways. So it goes. 🔦✝
I worked at NUMMI one summer. They hired college students to work on the production line during summer vacation season. Had to join the Union. The training was very thorough. I worked in the body shop making T Posts (the frame part between the front and rear doors) and also rear wheel wells for Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizms. While there I did hear some stories of GM Fremont shenanigans including weed smoking and drinking. Good group of hard working people I got to work with there. They called me back to work the following summer but I couldn’t do it because I was taking a summer school class. I still wear a scar I got at NUMMI. I was holding onto a part that was getting a repair weld and a welding spark landed between my glove and protective arm cover.
Maybe you worked on my old Prizm. It was a fantastic little car, roomy inside, reliable, punchy 1.8l engine, and priced just right.
@@pac1fic055Almost 200k on my 94 Prizm, she's still going strong! Insanely reliable cars.
Thanks for bringing this little known story (outside of the Bay Area) to light. I worked 18 years across the i880 from NUMMI/Tesla factory and drove one of the last NUMMI Tacoma. Great car, never had any issues with it.
Yeah some terrorist also drive NUMMI built pickup trucks.
@@Embargoman you’re probably referring to the Hilux. Toyota hasn’t sold one in the USA since they introduced Tacoma in 1995.
Yeah probably some first generation sold in the Middle East by terrorist as they use pickup trucks made in California could be odd, but Freemount had made vehicles for terrorist.
It was considered to be a career killer for a GM manager to be sent to NUMI. All the knowledge Toyota gave GM was ignored, much to Toyota's amazment.
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
Typical GM....they always know best... look at warranty claims. Government Motors
@@taylorsutherland6973yeah, most American auto manufacturers needed to be put out of business ages ago. They’ve crippled this country lobbying for huge segregating highways instead of quality rail, especially within cities.
Oh shut up and go live in a pod with your gay robot.@@DengueBurger
LOL... GM man... what a flippin joke, through and through. Folks wondered why the cars were turds, so were the people running it.
Earlier this year, the production facility I work at in the UK (electronics) brought in Nagamatsu san, one of the guys who implemented the whole lean/just in time process at Toyota.
It was a Shingijutsu Kaizen and was good fun if a bit of a steep learning curve. An honour to work with Nagamatsu san.
14:00 This is an often cited story. However, in Spanish, the word "nova" and the phrase "No va" have two different meanings, just like "notable" and "no table" in English. The original production run of the 1962-1979 Chevrolet Nova was a very popular compact rear-wheel drive car. That popularity didn't transfer over to the new front-wheel drive version based on the Toyota Corolla which was also built at NUMMI, so the car was rebranded as the Geo Prizm and later as the Chevrolet Prizm when General Motors discontinued the Geo make.
Thank you. The video producers clearly never fact-checked their assertions before committing it to video. Also note the Novas and Corollas built at NUMMI were the EXACT SAME VEHICLE with different badging. Ditto the later Geo Prism, then the Chevrolet Prism. This whole "Production" segment of the video was blatantly incorrect and casts doubt about the veracity of any of the other information in this video. Do better.
It's crazy how Toyota literally showed GM what to do and they still built trash afterwards.
😂
No offense, if you look at the American workers, too, they do all look like scummy C-grade students and high-school dropouts. The smug. Goes to show that under the right leadership and conditions, you can make a lot of dummies and vice-versa with a smart/diligent workforce put into a bad system/under bad management.
Crazy...yet jo bidin is your president...if only you Americans cared about silly stuff like that before debating Toyota and GM
@@march24-lp4pv crazy, dude, crazy
@@RawbLV Sure... everyone's crazy..
They applied the DEMING METHOD, like all Japanese companies and even the public functions in Japan. American statistician Edwards Deming taught the Japanese how to build in Quality and Continually Improve the Process when he was part of General MacArthur's team that re-organized and re-constituted Japan post WWII. To this day the Japanese award an annual Deming Award to the company or department that has the best Process Improvement of the year. Prior to Deming "made in Japan" meant what "Made in China" means today. The Japanese were not happy with this state of affairs and gladly absorbed Deming's Methodology.
Meanwhile, American industry was NOT INTERESTED. The rest is history.
Deming only went to Toyota after he was rejected by the big 4 in the US.
It seems American, Chinese, and increasingly European manufacturers are not interested. It seems they only want revenue from garage support and new sales as soon as the original warranty expires, instead of building up a reputation of reliability.
Exactly! I came to the comments to make sure someone had said this.
This is why no one with a brain buys American cars..(total junk) the big 3 can't even build a reliable power train... they will all go bankrupt again, Toyota is already pivoting into our current economic reality, creating lower cost high quality products worldwide that will all last 200k miles,
@@doujinflip
My Chinese made appliances, gadgets and devices are reliable and durable. 👍
Hey, I worked at this very factory for a short while in 2019! Tesla gave me 3 days of training and then set me loose, much different than what you described at Toyota.
I mean, it's Tesla. You build glorified toasters with bad (and expensive) batteries. Not much to assemble.
@@MiGujack3 More like glorified refrigerators. But then, I have a 40 year old "beer fridge" that's NEVER STOPPED WORKING. The batteries ... hmm, you have FACTS to back that up? No, didn't think so. Like PV panels or Intel processors, battery tech is improving at a tremendous pace. It's just you whiners don't mind if your phone is faster and better, but don't touch your noisy, smelly, expensive pickup!
@@capnkirk5528 You do know that when the EV battery loses it's efficiency to 80% charge it has to be replaced, for $4,000-$12,000? That's why smart people sell their 3-5 year old EVs to stupid people.
@@mutteringmale LMFAO. Are you a PAID troll, or do you work for free?
@@MiGujack3 Tesla still needs to improve the quality of their cars.
Sir, a very good video, I know that this GM plant was bad, I just didn't know it was horrible. Japan has a very good reputation for quality, but that was not always the case. Before WWII Japan was frankly known for junk. After WWII a man by the name Dr. William Deming, a quality expert and a professor from M.I.T. went to the American auto companys and wanted to show them statistical analysis and how it would improve car quality. They were not interested, becauce they could sell every car that came off the line. So then Dr. Deming approached the Japanese auto companies and they happily embraced the man and his knowledge. There is even a statue of him there. Statistical analysis is what you profiled in your video, seeing a problem and fixing it on the spot and treating quality as an never ending job. You might want to do a video on Dr. Deming and how he transformed Japan manufacturing. Only after losing great amounts of market share becauce of the Japanese dlid the Big 3 auto companies here start to imbrace iS.A. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much Success.
"Did you know that they found coke bottles in American built cars?"
"Grandpa please you're just exaggerating."
Grandpa was right, but required a bit more context. Dang though yeah, the intro sounded like a nightmare to be in for everyone.
The first Honda in the USA was so bad that no one would buy it. It was cheap, so I went to see it at a dealer. The shift knob came off. The clutch would only shift into 1st gear and the brakes didn't work at all.
But it was cheap. It took them 10 years to get their schiesse together, and now they're the 2nd best auto in the world, right behind Toyota.
Whatever manufacturing share was lost GM still sold more cars annually in the United States than anyone else for 90 years, until Toyota finally bested them at managing covid supply chain issues recently. The first time in 90 years that GM wasn't the number one auto manufacturer by sales volume in the United States.
@@gooser__43 when it comes to foreign brand presence Toyota Honda Nissan and Hyundai / Kia are at every intersection here in volume. Not mostly Toyotas and some Hyundai's and Kia's. Regardless what we see at the intersections is irrelevant to the fact that GM was the dominant auto manufacturer by sales volume annually in the United States for 90 years, only just being bested by Toyota for the first time because Toyota better managed their supply chain issues that were brought about by the whole covid fiasco. It is what it is. For 90 years GM sold more cars in the United States annually than any other manufacturer, beginning in 1931.
"WASHINGTON, Jan 4 2022 (Reuters) - Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T) outsold General Motors Co (GM.N) in the United States in 2021, marking the first time the Detroit automaker has not led U.S. auto sales since 1931.
Toyota sold 2.332 million vehicles in the United States in 2021, compared to 2.218 million for General Motors, the automakers said Tuesday.
GM's U.S. sales were down 13% for 2021, while Toyota was up 10%. For all of 2020, GM's U.S. sales totaled 2.55 million, compared with Toyota's 2.11 million and Ford's 2.04 million."
@@gooser__43 so my point stands regardless you're stoplight statistics.
I highly recommend you guys to watch the Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho (1986). It's basically what this video is all about. It's a comedy about the cultural change/clash in an US-Autoplant which was taken over by a Japanese car manufacturer.
Congratulations! 1,000 cars! :D lol
How about Blue Collar (1978) ? There is no Japanese element but provides a very raw insight into the bureaucracy and dysfunction in a Detroit auto plant.
The "Nova means 'no go'" thing is a business school story that's completely false but sounds too good to die.
Yes, using this myth in the video raises credibility concerns.
Va means 'go' in french, so nova --> no go.
Although that is a combination of 2 languages and not een spanish so take it as you will.
So, GM was having problems with the plant because their workers felt that management didn't care about them or what they thought, and therefore decided to raise hell. Toyota comes in, and fixes that in an instant by just giving the workers what they wanted: more agency. Wow, it's almost like if you treat your workers like human beings they actually do good work, so weird.
And then look what happened after Tesla took over… build quality went back to sh**, and worker pay and morale is low again ( I know a few who have tried working there and gave up)
@@pushsliceTesla is innovating manufacturing again. They are years ahead of everyone else.
"treat your workers like human" and the Japanese just don't go together.
O rly🤨? Is that the whole story now? Our lexicon needs a new word. I nominate idiology. Either that or maybe shill works. Depends on whether you believe that over simplified one sided story of yours or your just hawking it for undisclosed reasons.
Go figure
Thanks for the history. I've driven past that plant along the freeway in Fremont so many times and it's cool to know what was going on there.
And now they make crappy Teslas. Still Uhion, still making crap. The Testa is only average in reliability and people don't keep these silly EV's long, especially since there are no huge rebates anymore.
Think of it! A Tesla has hardly any critical engine parts, no radiator, no starter, no engine, no transmission, no cooling system and yet, they are "average".
@@mutteringmaleUhhhh...
Tesla is def not a Union Shop, m'dude
@@mutteringmaleThe last time the plant workers even TALKED about unionizing under the current company running the plant, they all got fired. 😂
I worked a the tesla plant and learned the lore and history. Thanks for the review. This plant has a wild history and also has some pretty neat legacy infrastructure - like the abandoned paint ovens on the roof.
Reminds me of the movie 1986 Gung Ho where a Japanese executive is "exiled" to the USA as punishment and has to bring an American auto production plant up to Japanese efficiency standards. Great movie.
At the same time, all of this was going on at GM I was working in a wood products factory on the west coast. The company brought in the same Toyota management system: Total Quality Management and Just in Time production. We got all the special training, tools, management support, etc. We did the pre-shift stretching exercises and the special quality control crew meetings. I learned skills and concepts that I still use these many years later. What happened? Our union was resistant and slow-walked at every turn. Ultimately, the plant was sold to a non-union company, and many people lost their jobs and had to re-apply for the new company. The union mentality killed the entire concept. How sad.
In my industry, unions are not unheard of, but extremely uncommon. Every union-run org I know of sounds terrible to work for based on stories I've heard. In this business it's very common for people to move around to other orgs, but union shops get avoided like plague, because you are guaranteed to have a bad time. My theory is that now that they're union shops, they can only get the worst of the worst to take a job working with them, thus making the union necessary and the toxic relationship between management and staff self-perpetuating. The proper solution is ejecting everyone and starting over, which occasionally happens, if they get absorbed in a merger with a larger non-union org.
I'm thankful that our Union and Company get along quite well all things considered.
I get that unions are protection and supposed to lift wages and whatnot. But overall I see a lot of unions just prevent companies from changing anything, changing layout and processes in a plant in an attempt to improve efficiency but stonewalled by the union. Crappy employees that do the minimum or nothing but keep their job. Pushing management away and creating antagonism.
Seems to me like a fair few protections could actually be accomplished with law, we have sick time requirements in many states, we could add PTO and other benefits, wage I think usually sorts itself but raising the floor (minimum wage) raises everyone's wage for the most part.
It's sad that while Unions have a noble cause, the second they gain any power it inevitably turns into massive corruption and no longer about the worker.
@@Jaker788 I think our institutions meant to protect to the worker are corrupt and weak. FLSA got watered down and the NLRB seems quite weak. There really is no alternative.
I think Unions probably should have a profit sharing with the company to encourage development and updating stuff.
Another (apocryphal?) sub-story: after the plant was running, GM sent a team of production specialists to ovserve operations, and bring lessons back to GM management, supposedly for disemmination. They became admirers of the system and culture.
When they brought the lessons back to GM, they were not well accepted. Rather than stay with GM and watch inferior ideas be propagated, most of the analysis team quit to work for Toyota.
Years ago I worked at Hewlett-Packard in Britain (before the company lost its way after the retirement of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard). There was a lot in common with the NUMMI approach: Single cafeteria and parking lot for all employees, from site manager to toilet cleaner. Small teams working to get consensus on how to do things. The realisation that it is better to stop production than to continue manufacturing products with defects.
I interned at Tesla as a quality engineer at the Fremont plant and met an engineer who used to work at NUUMI. They flew him out to Japan to get trained and learn the Japanese ways. Crazy to see a guy like him coming back to the factory he once worked at before.
Very interesting video! I had an 07 Corolla assembled at Nummi Fremont that was very well made, 200k miles of trouble free driving. It was still running great when I traded it in for a newer model.
This is one of the most fascinating videos on industry I've ever watched. Thanks for the great work.
I live in the Bay Area and my first car was a Nummi Toyota Carolla! If I'm not mistaken, the plant also made the car under the badge Geo Prism.
The Geo Prism was a JDM Corolla model adapted for the North American market. Why they didn't use the exact same model as the Corolla already built for North America and just swap badges I don't know. Most of the major parts were the same though, but there were differences deeper than the badges, and also some part bleed into North American built Corollas.
One major downside was that a NUMMI or Canadian Corolla with the 1.8L engine got a Delco alternator instead of the Denso alternator Toyota used in other markets with the 1.8. Ask me how I went through 3 of those piece-of-shit Delco alternators in my Canadian build 90s Corolla... Fast forward a decade and my newer mid-2000s Corolla built at NUMMI had a Delphi computer in it, which had to be replaced under recall, because GM used substandard solder on them.
I've had 2 NUMMI cars - and I still have one. A 2000 Corolla and a 2000 (Chevy) Prizm - the same car as the Corolla just with the bowtie on it and you can often get them cheaper because no one knows what they really are.
My Grandmother had a 1996 Corolla that was built in the Cambridge, Ontario Toyota plant and it was always nicer and more well built than either of my cars from Fremont even though it was a base model with the 4A-FE and the 3 speed auto. Slow as all hell though. The 1ZZ-FE may be an oil burner but it does actually move the car when you ask it to.
IIRC in 1998 the Prizm was about $2k less than a comparable Corolla, and you could use your GM credit card points to cover a lot of the cost!
Same for the Pontiac Vibe, A Toyota Matrix built side by side at NUMMI.
I remember being told about this plant and its history a few years ago. My girlfriend’s uncle is a long time service manager at a northern VA Chevy dealership and I had a conversation with him about American car quality vs Japan. Toyota in particular. He told me basically everything that you outlined here and I took that knowledge with me to my part time job at CARMAX. They used to call me Mr Toyota because I only sold used Toyota products. If they couldn’t afford it I would sell them a Honda or Mazda. I just didn’t want my customers to be weighed down by a car that will constantly break and eat their wallet. I think out of the 4 years I was at CARMAX I only sold two American cars.
When I bought, refurbished and resold used cars I learned right away to only sell Toyotas and Hondas.
@@joanfrederick9176Ford almost had me, and they're like the Republicans who strive desperately to lose every election by waiting till the last minute and announcing they're on a platform of abortion.
So, I researched and wanted to buy a Ford Maverick hybrid. Good price, good reliability and yet, every dealer wanted to reape me and lied to me and made it so hard to buy I instead just said "no". They almost had me, and they screwed it up.
It's sad comedy how much better Toyota is at building cars than Detroit is.
well, Western management is the culprit. In some industries, owners treated workers so poorly for several generations that unions massively grew in power.
@@PainterVierax I think the term you are looking for is "American management". I live in a small Euro country with strong unions, and stuff like workers having influence over production and managers using the same cafeteria are obvious, not something exotic.
@@ThePhiphler well, socialism and unions started in Europe cities during the industrial revolution (the novel Germinal occurred in France). American management (which btw is more and more prevalent across Europe) aggravated the tensions, industry unions and union shop are more common in NA as well. But the issue is just the result of liberal capitalism where workers are considered as a disposable resource to exploit, not far from slavery. Many legislation across EU changed in consequence, forcing companies to get back to caring about employees, whereas NA stayed more liberal therefore more conflictual between holders and the workforce.
@@PainterVierax I believe that studies show that a flat management structure actually makes your business more competetive and earns more money. It's a question about what the managers expect, if they are to behave like barons or not.
And only thing GM (Garbage Motor) can do is brainwash people with Real People BS. Looks at how horrible Cadillac Escalade is compared to a Mercedes-Benz G-Wagen and even Lexus LX and Toyota Land Cruiser are more exciting than a piece of shit Cadillac.
One thing not mentioned, during the time they were making Novas and Corollas on the same assembly line, Corollas were out selling Novas three to one. They were exactly the same car except for badging. That’s why GM bailed. It was at that time Toyota started to build the pickups which were very profitable for them. I worked at one the feeder shops making seat frames for Johnson Controls, and frame brackets for Dana. When demand increased for the trucks, they moved assembly to Texas where they could get cheaper labor, and take advantage of the even cheaper labor of Mexico. This move not only effected the thousands of workers at NUMMI, but also 3 times more of local suppliers. The cost of doing business in California not only affected GM, Ford and Chrysler had the same problems. It’s only a matter of time before Tesla will do the same.
I was given a private tour of this plant in the early 90s by the plant manager as my uncle was friends with him. It was run by Toyota then of course. Incredible to see and extremely well run
I obtained a masters from the University of Washington. Most of what I remember is from the Toyota Management System. It made it fun to learn as I have always been obsessed with the Japanese and their culture.
stop being weird gaijin
@@kingjoe3rdNah he's right, its a fascinating and unique country/people/culture. We're all aware of the exaggerated problems as its everywhere on Youtube since its trendy now to be anti-weeb or whatever it is. Got stationed in Japan for some years and thought it was a cool country with awesome people. Some of us don't care about anime but can respect the culture of attention-to-detail and pride in craftsmanship so many nations lack
Ok Mr. Robato.
My 2009 nummi made pontiac vibe is still doing well in the familly, i bought it new, sold it to my girlfriend who sold it back to my brother who still drive it...used it this summer and boy, that car still got a lot of life in it! I paid around 20k for it in april 2008...impressing! That car sure sold a lot of future toyota for my familly!
Vibe=RAV. Best kept secret in the industry. Like the Dodge D50 pickup truck, which was really made by Mitsubishi. I would never buy an small American truck unless it was a re-badged Japanese car.
Vibe is more like the Matrix, not rav. Back in early 2009 during depth of the GFC, Pontiac was one of the brands being shuttered and you could have had a Pontiac Vibe for less than $10k…. Good old days before feds started QE and all the associated inflation.
I like the rebranding of the Waterfall process as Poo Poo Ball Rolling Down Poo Poo Mountain.
My outstanding Toyota Tacoma was built by NUMMI and it has been the most reliable vehicle I have ever owned (still going strong after 22 years and 220,000 miles). You think GM would have learned something from Toyota regarding quality, but sadly that has not been the case.
Late 1940s, W. Edwards Deming is the man who taught Japan quality. After World War II, Deming visited Japan and at the request of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) gave a series of lectures on quality control to Japanese engineers and to top management on management's tasks and responsibilities.
11:10 The poo poo mountain analogy killed me 😂
A GM employee who was in upper management in Michigan told me Toyota learned how to do quality paint systems in a palate of colors from the NUMMI Fremont plant. That is Technology transfer.
Excellent video. Well organized, informative and great pacing. Thank you.
No mention of the classic 1986 movie Gung Ho inspired by the Nummi plant?
Clone of the movie Take This Job And Shove It.
I worked at Nummi as an IBEW 595 apprentice. I liked working there as it was interesting to see the vehicles coming together. And I also grew up down the street .
As an apprentice I worked all over Nummi ,under ground and even on the roof of Nummi .
Great memories and my EX wife father worked for Nummi (Bob McConnell) .
And how GM learned nothing.
The thought of being better than anybody else (so called exceptionalism) leads to the downfall of a person or a company.
According to this video, they learned a lot, but when they tried to put it into practice, union got in the way.
@@mintheman7Unions & management
@@mintheman7 I’ve driven modern GM vehicles… it can’t all be blamed on the unions, though they do share the blame.
Too much lousy quality electronics and associated engineering. I've owned a GM p/u truck for 12 yrs, and that's been a constant issue all along, even with only 37,000 miles on it.@@franzkoviakalak6981
Damn this was interesting ass all crap!
I hope very much your channel does very well!
Not only was this so informative it pieced together certain aspects of information so throughly that… I am remembering those in my life who gave me a tidbit here or a tidbit there.
Might sound super vague but this brought back childhood memories of people important in my life who have now passed.
Liked and subscribed forsure!
Agile and scrum management methods are super common in tech today, all thanks to Toyota's production system.
I never really understood scrum, the college I went to really tried to push it onto us (or simulate it) and it failed horribly.
A real company that offers internships did a big presentation about scrum to show it to us and it was awful, it sounded like corporate speak to me.
@@MiGujack3
Got to keep in mind they're systems designed to whip unionised boomers into something resembling an effective workforce.
If you're born with half a brain and use it, you outperform those by default and the system won't work on you since you don't exhibit the problems it's meant to fix.
Scrum appoints 'owners' out of a group of boomers who by default won't care at all and uses them as directors to find faults within work for example. You NEED that if people are passive.
To give you an example I was hired for 4 months into a Dutch municipality, a city. Each year they lost money and their thinking proces ended with 'report the losses', finance didn't redirect their problem to the workfloor and those didn't care.
This built up until they lost 6% of all (taxpayer!!) money put into that department, which was their own property portfolio, their real estate, their facilities.
So I was hired externally and set about diagnosing the problem.
What I found was lazyness, passivity, corruption and stupidity. THE major thing was they never redistributed utilities to the utilities company, to give you an idea those were privatised in 1994, I was hired in 2016. All those years they had paid taxes (mainly to the waterboard and province) on those objects.
Some objects were outright filed incorrectly, like an boomer idiot registering a sluice gate as a building and then getting it taxed, or adding "I dunno, lol, I'm a union member, I don't care" when asked if a sports pitch had drainage, prompting the waterboard to tax it as drained.
I filed on average 650 tax protests a week every week and the waterboard soon had two fulltime employees working just me protests. In all that time I lost a single case, won all the others. On average I reduced the annual financial burden by € 22800 a week.
For this efficiency I was ridiculed by boomer unionised workforce, with one saying quote "Why are you upset at losing your first case? You get paid regardless of the outcome." The concept of being the owner of your work was alien to that person, while I took the unjust ruling as almost an insult and pushed out an extra 200 cases that week.
When a shitty job landed within my team, it was given to the only junior in the room. I stepped up to shield him from it even though it wasn't stricly my job, but I could use a change. Then I was overstepped by a 61 year old unionised boomer who said, quote "Oh just give that to me. I won't do it and I'm 61 so they can't fire me.", the work did not get done.
For people like that you NEED a trick like Scrum to get them to care at all; make them play a game and through that structure be forced to start thinking.
@@EricLopushansky Yup, not having the teams decide what will be done in a sprint, because obviously management knows perfectly what can be done.
@@MiGujack3 toyota is kanban system. agile and scrum on the other hand, became popular because it allows consultants to charge many more hours for the same work with hour-long scrum meetings [cuz ppl never follow the rules]. ofc proponents of agile will retort 'that's not real agile, read the manifesto!' -- just like communists lol, there is a huge gap being the dream and reality. in software it's universally much better to design the product first, then build it. aka waterfall. agile in practice is a recipe of endless feature creep [aka more billable hours]. src -- 25 yrs as a software developer, from startups to fortune 500s.
2:43
The American workers got absolutely ROASTED
That's the truth
And it is the absolute truth that still holds today. Per the recent UAW demands of a 32 hr work week but paid for 40 .
@@bobroberts2371 did you watch the part regarding how much less training they got here?
@@TheAleksander22
From what I understand, the GM jobs were broken down so small that not much training was needed to do the job with any proficiency.
Did you watch the part about 20 % absenteeism , 7,000 grievances , random unauthorized strikes and generally labor trying to sabotage the company?
How about this, in one GM stamping plant ( not Freemont ) it took a shift plus to change a large stamping die. Faced with a possible plant closure, a few physical changes were made along with " don't be a union worker sleeping on the job " . Die change out was reduced to 45 MINUTES !!!!! I got this information DIRECTLY from the guy that redesigned the process and implemented the changes.
@@TheAleksander22 Also, having worked for a major consumer goods Japanese company, much of Japanese company culture / training has nothing to do with the specific job the person will be doing. It has to do with things like problem solving , getting along with others. In other words ,respecting others and not being a di. . . .k .
Toyota understands people..and it shows
I have a NUMMI car -- a 1988 Chevy Nova "Twin Cam." It's a peppy little beast and fun to drive because it's a stick shift. It's not my daily driver but i like it. They only made 3,400 of them, so it has some collector value too.
very odd that a criticism of the performance of the Japanese Navy during WW-2 was a rigid top-down decision making style while the US Navy had diffused some decision making into the ranks. This lower-level empowerment resulted in a more capable combat force and contributed to the US success in naval combat. Perhaps the Japanese did learn from their loss.
I understand why you would believe this but it doesn't have any correlation with effective management styles. Of course, you're correct that the style is superior however, that is not why the Japanese Empire failed it's objectives. The Americans had intelligence intercepts, access to better technology (although at the beginning of the war the Zero was superior we upgraded to more competitive aircraft) and the ability to out-manufacture. It didn't help that empire's Army and Navy were in competition with each other and failed to work together.
@@ryanreedgibson notice I wrote contributed.
No, as another commenter as noted they learnt from W. Edwards Deming. While he was ignored initially by the US, Toyota listened. I’m not sure Japan learned much from WW2, they try to ignore all of it, besides they they had nuclear bombs dropped on two cities and play the victim over that.
@@av_oidthe only ones crying victim these days are UAW and GM, etc. 😂
@@f430ferrari5 Historically GM has a lot of inertia built into their company culture.
I owned a NUMMI-built car, a 2004 Pontiac Vibe GT, from new until 2021. The day I drove it off the dealership lot was its last day at the dealer. It ran flawlessly, never requiring any warranty work or any repairs other than wear items and general maintenance, for almost 200,000 miles. Had GM still had an option for a NUMMI vehicle, I would have strongly considered it rather than the Toyota product I replaced it with.
@scottmanley - 2023-11-27
While the NUMMI plant closed in 2010, it was still shown as a VFR landmark on local Aviation charts as NUMMI as late as 2019.
@janithl - 2023-11-27
Oh hey, it's Scott Manley! 💖
@dmacpher - 2023-11-27
Odd crossover - but here we are
@rkan2 - 2023-11-28
@@dmacpher Not that odd really imo :P
@thedownwardmachine - 2023-11-28
I just checked and now it's called NOTAM.
Just kidding! It is PLANT (VPTES). Also, hi, Scoat Manlay!
@glennso47 - 2023-11-28
It’s now a factory where Tesla automobiles are being manufactured.