Tuesday, February 01, 2000
Ohio workers short on initiative, say Japanese
BY JOHN BYCZKOWSKI
The Cincinnati Enquirer
TOKYO — “It's always a pleasure to meet Buckeyes,” Honda Motor Co. Ltd. President Hiroyuki Yoshino said as he greeted the Ohio trade mission delegation to company headquarters here Monday.
And he knows Buckeyes: Honda has 13,000 associates in Ohio, and Mr. Yoshino spent almost five years in Ohio as head of the Marysville-based operations.
But do Buckeyes know the Japanese?
Honda officials as well as a top official of Isuzu — which will open a joint-venture engine plant in Dayton this summer — said their Ohio workers need to take more initiative in their jobs.
During a meeting of the Ohio trade mission with the Keidanren — a high-profile alliance of Japan's top business leaders — Isuzu Motors' managing director Tohru Kajiyama told Gov. Bob Taft that the company has had to send more Japanese managers to Ohio than it originally intended to.
Why? Ohio workers are requiring more training in Isuzu's method of manufacturing than expected, Mr. Kajiyama said in an interview. He said the 500 workers at the GM-Isuzu joint venture, expected to open in
July, need to understand their responsibility for the quality of the diesel engines they'll produce.
“One part has to have responsibility for the next part,” he said in halting English. “What's important is their thinking, (that) they have the responsibility and the authority” over production quality. “We have to strengthen that.”
Honda officials echoed that sentiment later in the day, at a reception before a two-hour private dinner with Mr. Taft and Mr. Yoshino, Honda's president. Company officials spoke of Honda's philosophy of “three joys:” the joys of buying, selling and creating.
“At Honda, we have a unique process of production,” said Toshio Mitsutomi, general manager of global human resources. “We need to encourage self-reliance” among Honda's Ohio work force. “They need to work, they need to do everything without Japanese support.”
The reason is Honda's growing North American operations. The automaker has plants in Ohio, Ontario and Mexico, with a new plant to open in Alabama in 2002. Ohio will be the center of those operations, providing support for all of them. Mr. Mitsutomi said Honda needs its Ohio associates to understand their role at the hub of those growing operations.
“We expect all Honda associates to understand the Honda philosophy,” he said. “We want new associates with a passion, a dream. Our founders, they didn't expect workers to follow a manual. We expect (an associate) to work for himself and reach his own ideals.”
The company's Ohio operations are 20 years old, and the first generation of those workers “learned by watching.” His concern is how new workers assimilate Honda's philosophy.
That concern might only increase as the work force ages. Honda expects to require a growing number of new workers every year. The company had 3 percent turnover in its Ohio work force last year, meaning that it hired about 400 workers just to maintain its work force at 13,000.
That hiring requirement is expected to grow as retirements increase and might be made more difficult by the current low unemployment in Ohio and tight labor supply. Honda once boasted 30,000 applications on file, but that number is down considerably for it and its suppliers, as the labor market tightens, officials said.
And although Honda has no current plans to expand its Ohio operations, Mr. Yoshino said, “I hope we will have a gradually increasing work force over there.”
When he headed Ohio operations, Mr. Yoshino said he once walked around the plant, spoke to 200 associates to ask for their ideas about improving production, and he enacted those ideas on the spot. The pedometer he had on his belt that day told him that his expedition for ideas took him 15 miles.
Last year, Honda put up record numbers from its Ohio operations: 685,900 cars, 130,160 motorcycles and 900,000 engines. The plants are making all they can, and Honda is selling all it can produce. The challenge today is “how to produce the maximum units from existing facilities,” said Tetsuo Iwamura, general manager of Honda's operations in North America and Europe.
That means Honda will lean on employees for even more ideas on how to improve quality and efficiency, he said.
“At this moment, I'm satisfied” with the level of input, Mr. Iwamura said, “but it's a challenge.”
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