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PreparationsThe first step involved the establishment at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday, February 1 (while the P-valve lines were still on fire), of an “emergency response unit” at Aisin to centralize and coordinate efforts to deal with the crisis in an orderly and organized manner. At 6:30 a.m., the unit was reorganized and divided into four teams, dealing respectively with production (for example, the setting up of alternative production sites), materials handling (for example, the delivery of materials to those sites), liaison with customers (for example, Toyota, which was immediately contacted), and general affairs (e.g., negotiations with Aisin’s union). The unit’s first meeting was held at noon; twenty-seven meetings subsequently took place until February 21. The second step involved contacting potential collaborators and deciding who would do what, since many kinds of P-valves were needed (there are more than 100 main types of P-valves) and available equipment and capacity differed from firm to firm. After consulting its clients on which P-valves should be given priority, Aisin started as early as Sunday, February 2 (the day after the fire), to fax design drawings to various firms that had already voluntarily offered their help (e.g., Taiho Kogyo, which had contacted Aisin on hearing about the fire on the radio) or had agreed to the request of Aisin or its clients (for example, Kayaba, which was asked for help on the day of the fire by Mitsubishi Motors and the next day by Toyota and Aisin).In many respects, of course, the firms that “voluntarily” offered their help were forced to cooperate with Aisin and Toyota. Failure to do so might have jeopardized future business relations with Toyota-group firms; moreover, because of JIT, most suppliers were losing millions of yen every day that Toyota plants remained shut down. Still, cooperation worked both ways. For example, Toyota chose not to put pressure on Aisin to give priority to its own models to the detriment of Aisin’s other clients, such as Mitsubishi, even though it could have easily done so given Aisin’s financial and commercial dependence on Toyota. Pressuring Aisin would have yielded Toyota short-term gains, but in the long run, the parties concerned would remember such actions and possibly retaliate in some fashion.After reviewing the faxed design drawings, its equipment availability, and its pertinent technical capabilities, each firm had to notify Aisin of its decision on whether to participate in the recovery effort. The process was not easy because most of the firms had never produced P-valves and knew little about the technical implications of P-valve production. Moreover, the design drawings they received lacked necessary technical details for first-timers and needed to be decoded into something more readily understandable.To make matters worse, P-valve production had to be organized without Aisin’s special-purpose machines and drills because these were seriously damaged in the fire. As noted earlier, P-valves require highly precise machining, and to manufacture more than 30,000 of them a day requires highly customized jigs, drills, and transfer machines. Instead, firms would have to rely on general-purpose machines such as machining centers to manufacture P-valves, which most firms already possessed. This method would mean much higher labor content and lower productivity than usual.Compounding the problem, Aisin’s know-how was largely restricted to the special-purpose transfer machines, making it difficult for Aisin to instruct firms on how to manufacture P-valves by other means. Furthermore, although a few drills were salvaged from the fire, there were only enough to allocate one drill per firm, which slowed down production because the drill had to be used with extra caution to avoid breaking. Moreover, not one but many different drills were needed, and the scarce ones received from Aisin were not a perfect match for machining centers.Yet another problem was the difficulty in controlling quality without Aisin’s special-purpose gauges. To ensure the reliability and durability of the brake system, quality control is very strict, involving at least seventy inspection steps per piece. Even though Aisin was to double-check every incoming P-valve, firms had to conduct some form of quality control before delivery, using general-purpose gauges.
Finally, in the first few days of the crisis, Aisin was in a state of chaos and was difficult to contact. Indeed, so confused were conditions at Aisin that during the evening of the first day of the fire, Taiho Kogyo’s director of production control was wrongly informed that master cylinders, not P-valves, were the main problem for Aisin. Within days, Aisin installed 250 additional fixed phones and 300 mobile phones in an attempt to accommodate skyrocketing inquiries. The magnitude of incoming calls, however, overwhelmed Aisin’s capacity to respond.
Because Aisin lacked sufficient resources to provide direct assistance to every firm at once, collaborating firms had to figure out by themselves how to program their machining centers for P-valve production and find or make appropriate drills. For example, Denso scrambled for drills from all over Japan and even sourced some special ones from a U.S. maker arranged for by Denso’s Tennessee plant. Although Aisin supported these efforts as much as it could by setting up a “drill center” to coordinate drill purchases and by organizing meetings to discuss technical problems and solutions, firms had to rely largely on their own capabilities to begin P-valve production.
For all these reasons, many firms declined to help at all, judging their equipment and capabilities insufficient to manufacture P-valves. But many accepted, including Denso, Taiho, Kayaba, and Toyota, which agreed to manufacture between two and five types of P-valves each. These and other firms then immediately started preparations for P-valve production.
At this point, significant differences in the firms’ approaches to P-valve production emerged. Denso gave full priority to in-house P-valve production, and some of Denso’s other processes were temporarily outsourced to make room for P-valves. In all, about forty machining centers were made available at Denso for P-valve production. Taiho met with thirty of its suppliers the day after the fire to plan an appropriate division of labor, eventually involving eleven suppliers in the effort, with Taiho itself taking charge of the final processes. Fifty machining centers were made available at two of the firm’s three local plants.
Toyota set up temporary production sites in its Honsha plant, entrusting P-valve production to the division responsible for experimental prototype production and machinery maintenance, whose engineers and operators possessed considerable knowhow in setting up machines for new models and preparing the transition to volume production. Kayaba’s approach involved outsourcing P-valves to three of its suppliers, with no actual P-valve production taking place in any of its own factories. It chose three prototype specialists, the largest with 110 employees and the others with only sixteen and six employees, respectively. Originally Kayaba had contacted about ten suppliers, of which three were chosen on the basis of equipment availability and technical capabilities.
At this stage, the collaborating firms established their own “emergency response units” to coordinate P-valve production activities. A challenge for many firms was to ensure close collaboration among usually remotely related units. Kayaba set up a special team, under the direction of Kayaba’s director of production engineering, to centralize control and coordinate activities with the suppliers concerned; the team was composed of sixteen employees from the quality assurance, production engineering, and purchasing departments. Three salespeople were also dispatched to Aisin to obtain real-time information and feedback. At Toyota, the production control department was put in charge of coordinating in-house P-valve production and direct assistance to Aisin.
Production Begins
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