Mazda University: American workers study kaizen

After a hard day at the auto plant last week, Mark Daniel and his co-workers played a couple of games of softball, then went out for pizza and a few beers. But the scene was not Detroit or any other American factory town. Instead, the unlikely site of Daniel's work and play was Hofu (pop. 120,000), a city 56 miles southwest of Hiroshima in Japan. Daniel, along with 47 other Americans who work for the U.S. subsidiary of Mazda, the third largest Japanese automaker, was finishing up a four-week stint at the firm's Hofu assembly plant. Their goal: to learn how to build cars the Japanese way. Said Daniel, a Michigan native whose father and grandfather worked for General Motors: "I'm the first member of my family to go foreign."

Mazda will be bringing hundreds of American workers, most of them supervisors, to Hofu in preparation for next September's opening of its first U.S. factory, an assembly plant in Flat Rock, Mich. Much like the fictional Assan Motors in the recent Michael Keaton movie Gung Ho, Mazda bought a closed-down factory from Ford, which owns 25% of the Japanese company, and is building a new $450 million facility on the site. It is Mazda's largest single investment ever, and the Japanese are sparing no effort to ensure the factory's success.

Labor-management relations will be especially delicate. As Mazda fills the 3,500 jobs at the new facility, the company has been giving preference to laid-off Ford workers, most of whom are members of the United Auto Workers. The U.A.W., which has saluted Mazda's Hofu training program as part of an "enlightened approach" to operating in the U.S., intends to organize the entire Flat Rock work force. That would create the closest partnership yet between a Japanese car company and an American union. Although Toyota's joint car-building venture with General Motors in Fremont, Calif., employs U.A.W. members, the union does not deal directly with the Japanese firm. Both Honda and Nissan use nonunion labor in their American plants.

In Japan last week, Mazda's new American employees were learning things they never heard much about at the union hall. In particular, they were lectured about the Japanese tradition of kaizen, meaning a worker's commitment to finding ways to do his job better and more efficiently. On the Hofu assembly line, a group of Americans clutching stopwatches and clipboards hovered around Kazuyuki Toda, a Japanese worker, as he demonstrated how to do a job poorly, with too much muda, or wasted motion. The Americans were then asked to suggest ways of doing the job faster. Their ideas ranged from simple improvements, like grabbing a handful of bolts at once instead of stepping back to the bolt tray after using each one, to the installation of a moving parts tray, which would save even more time. The object of Mazda's training program, said its supervisor, Keishi Motoyama, is to erase the "traditional American separation between the planner and the person responsible for doing a job."

Mazda officials praised their American students for being hardworking and eager to learn but noted that some ingrained attitudes needed changing. Said Motoyama: "The Americans don't seem to be very good at deciding things in groups. Each individual has a very strong opinion of his own. They have to learn to step back and accept other ideas."