2016 Volume 15 Issue 6 Pages 309-330
This paper took up the case of Introduction of Early Stage Control (ESC) System, particular to Japanese production management, into the foreign group company (auto parts maker) in Asia with minor investment ratio on Japanese company side. ESC system is an essential tool to assure the high level of QCD of the new products during the process from R&D development to production, which is considered as one source of the competitiveness of Japanese makers. Implementation of ESC is quite difficult for foreign companies, though the Japanese counterparts flexibly handle it. In this paper, we clarified what kind of problems the local company faced with and how they dealt with them to implement ESC properly. The ARC framework was used to analyze the case from the perspective of organizational design. We found out the importance of 1) positioning ESC tasks properly in the organizational structure, 2) making a formal flow of information for decision making on ESC, 3) putting ESC tasks in the formal assessment and payment system, and 4) the Architect-type leadership of top management to optimize the whole process of ESC across the various related functional departments concurrently.
