ITT Automotive Global Manufacturing Strategy 1994 Case Solution

While this option makes a lot of sense for the German plant, where the cost of labour is quite high and where the process of automation is already underway. The situation at the US plants is different. The Asheville plant in particular will not benefit much from automation, in fact, automation is expected to increase defect rate as quality control by humans is deemed more efficient. The US plants also follow a Kaizen approach to work, which encourages workers to improve continuously.

Since the ground realities for the different plants for the two countries is different, it is not recommended that a standard method of production, full-automation or partial automation, is implemented across all the plants. To optimize production, the company must deploy that method of production that best suits a particular plant. In addition to this, while automation is efficient and leads to standardization it does have the drawback of not being flexible and once the design and technology changes the company will need to invest in equipment once again to set-up a new production process from scratch. This may prove to be extremely costly.