Just-in-time production transformed Porsche
The crux of Porsche’s financial problem in the early ’90s was simple: too many workers making too few cars too slowly. Sorting out the mess required an entirely new approach – and some outside assistance from the other side of the world.
Enter new boss Wendelin Wiedek ing, in 1992, who hired consultants McKinsey. At their prompting, Porsche managers were soon on a plane to watch Japan’s car industr y at work. T hey learned about kaizen, the process of delivering car parts to factories ‘ just in time’. T hey watched as Japanese workers completed tasks twice as quick ly as their German counterparts.
Engineers from Shin-Gijutsu – a consultancy largely compr ised of for mer Toyota engineers – in turn visited Zuffenhausen to interrogate the Porsche production process for inefficiencies. T hey were not hard to find, starting with the habit of having a month ’s worth of parts in stock, through which workers had to sift in order to find the components they needed. The Japanese obser vers identified the problem but it was Porsche that came up with the low-tech if effective solution: trolleys loaded with parts for each step of the process, periodically replenished from a well-ordered storage area.
A nother big change was cross-functional work ing. W here before engineering, design, sales and marketing had worked independently, now they collaborated.
Porsche was transformed. Inventor y was dow n to seven days, build times slashed from 120 hours to 72 hours, the work force reduced from 8400 to 6800, and quality rocketed – not to mention efficiencies tapped by twinning the Boxster with the 911. After
