GMSCM Students Visited BrogWarner

April. 1, 2016 Ningbo - We have been discussing the gaps between Chinese manufacturing companies and their competitors around the world for decades, and thus numerous conclusions had been made to explain how the gaps occurred covering almost every field from corporation strategy, HR management, etc. But nothing would be more impressive when we went through our business tour to Ningbo BorgWarner Inc., one of our classmates’ working company and one of the global product leaders in powertrain solutions.

We were turning a blind eye to those minor things in our daily working time, sometimes feeling embarrassed to criticize your colleague, sometimes we ourselves thought it was nothing, not defects, not worth of mention. We only cared about those Key Numbers, like sales turnover, profits, etc. Everything seemed fine! And we were glad everything was moving, may be not as fast as we expected, but you know, there would be reasons. That was what we called variables and everyone knew variables cannot be predicted and be fully controlled.

When we stepped in to the manufacturing plant, everything was in order. There was sign niched on the top of every session of the assembly line stating the functions and details of the working procedure, for example, Twisted the nut clockwise 270 degrees. Simple and clear, reminding the workers to follow the exact what they should do. The spare parts and tools were located at the certain places, not like the usual way, being put into some tool boxes, they were laid flat on the shelves. And if you lifted up the tools, you could see the sketch of the tools painted on board, which seemed to be the most convenient place for you to reach as soon as possible. And that reminded me of an old saying: The devil’s in details.

It was always true that front line staff knew the best in manufacturing than the top management of the companies. The key factor was how to drive the workers from just working to thinking. During the lecture in BorgWarner, the guest speaker clearly stated that for the development and training of the employee, 70% relied on the practice in daily working, 20% relied on working instruction and communication and only 10% relied on lecture training in the classroom. That explained why we often felt our inside trainings were always less effective than we expected. Sometimes, the training course turned out to be an off-work get-together. Although the attendances surrendered dozens of summaries but in fact they would be back to their routine ways just a few days after their training courses.

We had seen dozens of cases for internal enterprise school, and now we met one of the best.

In the year of 2015,the lean implementation road map based on current value stream was created, and the projects such as TPM, Digital plant system, SMED were introduced to front line workers just as we MBA students did. And dozens of achievement were accomplished by the students which really impressed us.

This trip was short but fruitful, we did see the contrast between the global leaders and us, and this would definitely push us to think how to improve our own working companies. If there was a pity, that would be lacking of the chances to have a face to face conversation with those students studying in the lean institute.

(GMSCM 2014 LIN Xiao)