Harley Davidson’s Just-in-Time Essay Example for Free

Harley Davidsons Just-in-Time EssayThis case is about the Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. After human race War II, they facedwithcompetition from Japanese companies, which were able to produce better quality motorcycles at comparatively lower cost. Harley-Davidson found that there were three closely important practices of Japanese companies, which differentiated their production process from that of others JIT manufacturing, employee involvement, and statistical process control.Harley-Davidson adopted those three principles and formulated different strategies to progress to this move possible and to make its manufacturing processes as efficient 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 again acquire into hard times, this case presents how it was trying to focus on continuous improvement i n a bid to bring itself back into profits. Question 1 wherefore has continuous improvement been so successful at Harley Davidson?Continuous improvement is ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can seek additive improvement over time or breakthrough improvement all at once. Under continuous improvement, a task or series of tasks were set as the problem area in the business process, manufacturing operations, and product development where improvement could be made. Harley-Davidson required the active participation and commitment of its employees to help in eliminating unnecessary steps and complexity for the process and to bring more flexibility into the outline.Continuous improvement helped the company identify savings opportunities and put those mechanisms into places, similarly amend the quality standards and the reduced the waste 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 response to final demand. Question 2 Considering the road ahead, what specific actions can Harley Davidson take that will move them toward their goals? Harley Davidson could keep doing continuous improvement.Take a closer look at its operations in a bid to get its cost structure right and manage shipments consistent with the expected slowness of consumer spending. For continuous improvement, its begins with identify the occurrent process and take a vote on which process would most benefit from improvement, then map out the quick process using a project board like A3 report. After fully understand the process, identify areas of opportunity surrounding 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 aptitude or costs and gain efficiencies, the company has consolidated some of its production facilities, and parts, accessories and general merchandise distribution 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 draw the flexibility to produce multiple product families on the same assembly line every day at the beginning of 2009.