Smart engineering processes: ‘made in Japan’

When people hear ‘operations excellence in Japan’, manufacturing innovations instantly spring to mind. This is not surprising considering the revolutionary concepts ‘just in time’, ‘cell manufacturing’, and ‘total quality control’, all of which bear a Japanese hallmark. Operations excellence in Japan, however, is not limited to manufacturing but spreads into other areas, such as cost control, supplier management, and product development too. This article concentrates on tried-and-tested product development strategies that originated in Japan, such as front loading, lead time reduction, and cost planning. The focus is turned sharply on the automotive industry, the birthplace of these groundbreaking R&D organizational processes.