The number of AISIN SEIKI overseas subsidiaries has been increasing rapidly since 2000, keeping pace with the globalization in the automobile industry. In this environment, the reinforcement of personnel training, in overseas production subsidiaries, has become one of the most important corporate activities. In this report, I will describe the outline of personnel training in overseas subsidiaries and the TQM promotion activity as its representative activity.

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The R-CATS activities of SHARP is always trying to discover issues and problems at work-places, to voluntarily improve the status quo, and to solve those issues together with other colleagues. Our activity has already grown to a learning organization where a learning and growing method, not a teaching and nurturing method, has been applied. The activity is now supporting our management as a significantly effective activity for improving our organizational capacity by spreading into every corner of the organization including the bases in and out of Japan. Here, we would like to introduce our development in overseas bases.

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Honda of America Mfg. began on September 10, 1979, with the production of simple red dirt bike, the Honda CR250R Elsinore, produced by 64 associates. HAM associates quickly progressed from manufacturing motorcycles to automobiles and engines with the quality. HAM 13,000 associates and community have plenty to celebrate as the company reaches its 25^<th> Anniversary on September 10, 2004. One of the major factors in the success of HAM has been the abilities of associates to work together to achieve their targets. Since 1979, HAM associates continued to develop their skills and prepare for future growth. This paper addresses some of the considerable achievements of training and development made at HAM during the last 25 years.

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In Sanden, two-thirds of both the company sales and the number of employee became overseas related operations. North America and Singapore overseas local corporations won Deming prize in 2006. Deming prize is an important aim for personnel training of overseas national staff. However, we recognize that quality improvement of the management is time consuming and is necessary activity of patience. As to the training of overseas national staff, whose customs and culture are different each, we decided to start with unification of corporate philosophy and a way of thinking of management like we do for Japanese. Then, we established an English handbook and named the Sanden quality management STQM. We defined STQM as the actions and TQM as every technique. Company activity by quality became clear by these definition. Standardization of a way of thinking is the most important for personnel training of overseas national staff. Needless to say, actions of higher aim setting, challenge and innovation are required for improvement of our STQM activity.

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Takahata Precision Co., Ltd is the company of manufacturing the plastic mold parts and the mold design, which has established 3 factories in the Industrial Park in the suburb area of Thailand. As a measure for the confliction or the unsatisfaction generated by the nationality difference between Japanese and Thai, the operation by Thai local workers has been encouraged early so that they could raise the labor productivity. The local language Thai is spoken, neither English nor Japanese, to foster the middle management between Japanese management and Thai operators. Japanese management started to observe Thai lifestyle habit, and then he discovered the positive aspects that would function for the factory administration in Thai temperament, and created the training way for Thai workers. The management had the local operators to the tour of their competitors, and they had them communicate with the clients through the process check at the factory. It enables him to inspire the local workers and to stimulate their self-respect to encourage the improvement of labor productivity. Japanese management worked with the local operators as co-workers, and enlightened the sense and the means of Quality Assurance and Customer Satisfaction. They have grown the local operators to become the work leaders. Takahata Precision aims to foster of Thai management personnel responsible for succeeding and developing the company identity, that can manage the Thai workers' instead of Japanese one.

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It is one of the most important issues to enhance development of human resources in overseas subsidiary such as China and Thailand. The fundamental purpose of TQM is to develop human resources based on problem solving activities such as policy management, objective management, quality assurance programs, continuous improvement, and QC circle activities. We discuss some problems about the promotion of QC education in many companies that are expanding business overseas, and show that TQM provides some answer to the problems and the quality-consciousness by the inquiry survey to some successful companies.

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The Mahalanobis-Taguchi System (MTS) has been proposed as a forecasting method using multivariate data for asymmetric discrimination problems such as the coin classification in a vending machine. In the situation, the normal coins constitute a separate population but the false coins do not. In this article, not only the unconditional but also the conditional error rates of a future observation from a normal group are investigated. If a nominal error rate is set by using chi-square distribution, the expected error rate will be much larger than the nominal value and the conditional error rates fluctuate around the expected value in the small sample cases. On the other hand, if the nominal error rate is set by using F distribution, the expected error rate coincides with the nominal value and the conditional error rates tend to be stable. Since it is difficult to estimate the conditional error rates based on an initial sample, it is advisable to set nominal values based on F distribution.

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