Harley’s quality dream leader
Written by Anonymous 4 months ago
Respected gurus of the quality management movement believe quality begins at the top. If so, then James McCaslin, president and COO of Harley-Davidson Motor Company, embodies the ideal. As keynote speaker at IndustryWeek's 2008 Best Plants Conference, McCaslin cruises in on his Harley, strides to the podium and lays out the company's mission: "To inspire and fulfill dreams around the world through Harley-Davidson experiences." McCaslin champions the delivery of "experiential quality" to the customer. He has burnished this value concept into the Harley brand, making sure it permeates company operations. The company's passion, he says, is to attain the WOW factor, to spark the customer's emotional commitment by realizing quality in the look, sound and feel of the ride. Harley employees, he adds, have to be passionate about quality to design and build an engine that emits the trademark "lop lop" Harley sound. This passion is "in the bricks," says McCaslin. Getting products and services right means survival.
McCaslin highlights a watershed in Harley's continuous-improvement odyssey – the discovery in the mid-eighties that Honda's success had nothing to do with the Japanese culture and everything to do with people management. That marked a management shift, which tied people to quality and ensured the company's future. Customers' value perceptions set the blueprint for Harley products and services, while "working together" to find solutions became the company's operational hook. Today, that working concept has evolved into what McCaslin describes as co-management by partnering groups, as exemplified at Harley's decade-old Kansas City assembly plant. There, company managers partner with reps from the steelworker and machinist unions to run an efficient production operation without supervisors or management-rights clauses. (Self-managed teams that don't meet production numbers temporarily lose their autonomy to company bosses until productivity improves.)
For 25 years, Harley has grown at a pace that protects its quality standards. Comprising 30% of the company's total profits, international sales, especially in Europe, Canada, Brazil and Japan, are booming. The recipe for success has been simple, explains McCaslin. First, the company is crafting better bikes with engines that no longer leak. Six Sigma and lean tools produce savings that buoy up cash flow during hard times and finance expansion when the economy is good. But strong customer focus and aggressive marketing campaigns are what's made Harley a world-class contender. Today, management reps mingle directly with consumers to get a closer read on market trends, keeping ideas for product designs current. Massive company-sponsored biker rallies, from Milwaukee to Hamburg, Germany, to Nagasaki, Japan, boost sales by parading Harley products to a wider audience. The events entice new customers by playing up the feeling of fun and safety to be had while riding in a Harley motorcade. Domestic and international dealerships have evolved from dirt-floor bike shops to clean modern spaces where well-trained managers welcome an ever-more diverse set of Harley devotees.
More can and will be done to scale up today's quality achievements, says McCaslin, who's striving to double the numbers of female riders (among other goals). He believes the "sense of freedom and the open road" experienced in the Harley ride can appeal across cultures. And he could be right. It's already helped Harley grab first place in Japan's home market for heavy bikes.
To view McCaslin's dynamic presentation, please click here.
And for much more on quality-improvement strategies, click here.
McCaslin highlights a watershed in Harley's continuous-improvement odyssey – the discovery in the mid-eighties that Honda's success had nothing to do with the Japanese culture and everything to do with people management. That marked a management shift, which tied people to quality and ensured the company's future. Customers' value perceptions set the blueprint for Harley products and services, while "working together" to find solutions became the company's operational hook. Today, that working concept has evolved into what McCaslin describes as co-management by partnering groups, as exemplified at Harley's decade-old Kansas City assembly plant. There, company managers partner with reps from the steelworker and machinist unions to run an efficient production operation without supervisors or management-rights clauses. (Self-managed teams that don't meet production numbers temporarily lose their autonomy to company bosses until productivity improves.)
For 25 years, Harley has grown at a pace that protects its quality standards. Comprising 30% of the company's total profits, international sales, especially in Europe, Canada, Brazil and Japan, are booming. The recipe for success has been simple, explains McCaslin. First, the company is crafting better bikes with engines that no longer leak. Six Sigma and lean tools produce savings that buoy up cash flow during hard times and finance expansion when the economy is good. But strong customer focus and aggressive marketing campaigns are what's made Harley a world-class contender. Today, management reps mingle directly with consumers to get a closer read on market trends, keeping ideas for product designs current. Massive company-sponsored biker rallies, from Milwaukee to Hamburg, Germany, to Nagasaki, Japan, boost sales by parading Harley products to a wider audience. The events entice new customers by playing up the feeling of fun and safety to be had while riding in a Harley motorcade. Domestic and international dealerships have evolved from dirt-floor bike shops to clean modern spaces where well-trained managers welcome an ever-more diverse set of Harley devotees.
More can and will be done to scale up today's quality achievements, says McCaslin, who's striving to double the numbers of female riders (among other goals). He believes the "sense of freedom and the open road" experienced in the Harley ride can appeal across cultures. And he could be right. It's already helped Harley grab first place in Japan's home market for heavy bikes.
To view McCaslin's dynamic presentation, please click here.
And for much more on quality-improvement strategies, click here.
