Mar 18 2018
Nissan Yokohama and Iwaki Plant Visits | Christoph Roser | All About Lean
“Overall, Nissan automotive plants have an outstanding performance, comparable to Toyota despite their different approach using much more automation. I believe that Nissan plants are also among the world’s best automotive plants, besides (behind?) Toyota. I definitely enjoyed the visit (but then, I am a geek for such kind of things).”
Sourced from All About Lean
Michel Baudin‘s comments: Thanks again to Christoph Roser for sharing this. Reading this reminded me that, when he took over as Nissan CEO, Carlos Ghosn left the plants alone. They were doing fine. What needed fixing, he decided, was product design and the supply chain. History has since validated his choices.
March 18, 2018 @ 9:31 am
…apart from closing Zama plant!
March 18, 2018 @ 4:29 pm
Zama was a major industrial tourism destination in 1980, for its robots. Times change.
At the time, I had not visited it. I had seen the Oppama plant, which I believe is still in business. I remember that “Toyota” was referred to as “the T company from Aichi prefecture” and that Kanbans were called “Workplates.”
I have a 2005 Japanese book on the Nissan Production Way that shows many similarities to TPS but differences as well. They talk about “synchronous manufacturing” (同期生産) and “production instructions” (生産指示) but not Kanbans. In quality, they have an approach called QRQC for “Quick Response Quality Control” that I don’t believe is in TPS but is quite popular in France, probably through the Renault connection.
March 19, 2018 @ 11:18 pm
Hi Michel, many thanks for the kind words 🙂
Chris