Evaluation of Quality Manuals application within Honda Motors

Running Head TASK C
Evaluation of Quality Manuals application within Honda Motors
A case study evaluation
Name of the Student
Department of Design Engineering
Author note

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Abstract
The purpose of this essay l=is to present a list of quality standards and their significance in
operational principles of a chosen organisation to judge the validity of the argument “Quality
manuals are a waste of time, they take too long to prepare and don’t make any difference to
the quality of the product”. Various quality management tools and the quality standardisation
process has been evaluated in this essay. This Essay has focused on the ISO standards
(ISO9000) for quality management, Six Sigma implementation, Just in time management,
Total Quality Management, Total Productive Maintenance, Poka Yoke, benchmarking,
World class manufacturing and other design methods.

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Introduction
One of the most popular automobile companies Honda has 2 major goals to keep their quality
management comprehensive enough for making profit. As mentioned in Global.honda.
(2018), these goals are “To strive to be a company that the society wants to exist” and “To be
determined to meet and even exceed the customer expectation”. The company also has their
own “Higher Product Quality Standards” to perfectly aligned their quality management
principles with the organisational objectives (Global.honda. 2018). At the same time, many
scholars argue the significance of quality manual and its impacts time consumption. This
essay will present a list of quality standards and their significance in operational principles of
a chosen organisation to judge the validity of the argument “Quality manuals are a waste of
time, they take too long to prepare and don’t make any difference to the quality of the
product” (Qualitydigest.com. 2016). Various quality management tools and the quality
standardisation process will be evaluated in this essay. For this, this Essay will focus on the
ISO standards (ISO9000) for quality management, Six Sigma implementation, Just in time
management, Total Quality Management, Total Productive Maintenance, Poka Yoke,
benchmarking, World class manufacturing and other design methods.
Key words- Honda Motors, Quality Management, ISO9001, TQM, HOQ
ISO standardisation and it significance in Honda Motors
The ISO9000 and ISO9001 are the system and operational controlling standardisation
principles or guideline that holds that signifies the importance of quality manuals. ISO90001
is a subset of the core standardisation principle ISO9000. Based on the ISO90001 and
ISO/TS 16,949 the G-HQS the Global Honda Quality Standard controls the quality product
procurement and manufacturing system (Fonseca 2015). The G-HQS was established in April
2005 for prevent any quality issue from recurring. With this regards it is worth mentioning

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that ISO/TS 16949 us an international quality management system standard for automotive
industry (Stylidis, Wickman and Söderberg, 2015). After the operational changes in
procurement service from 2005 the design, development, production, sales and after sales
service quality has been improved significantly. In 2011, the Initial Quality Study or IQS for
automobiles conducted by J.D Power has been proved that the impacts of G-HQS on
customer satisfaction are statistically significant with a higher coefficient value (Stylidis,
Wickman and Söderberg 2015). It has been found that ISO standardisations not only
improved the operational quality of Sub-compact, Compact, SUV and Sedan cars, rather it
has significant impact in profitability growth, especially in U.S., Japan, China, India and
Thailand. The quality of the products has ensured a comparatively longer time customer
loyalty. In the subsequent years the Consumer Life-time Value or CLV of Honda have
projected on an average 3.5% increment in each year (Fragassa, Pavlovic and Massimo
2014).
Six sigma
Six-sigma is a method of detective quality gap in product life cycle considering both
manufacturing and logistics operations. It is the most disciplined, statistical data based, data
driven approach, which can offer the continuous quality improvement method in product,
process and service. Honda never directly implemented six-sigma quality improvement
structured in their operational process. However, in the history of competition Honda had to
compete many other strong competitors in automotive industry such as Ford, Volkswagen,
Hyundai and others. One of the major competitors of Honda in global automotive market is
Ford. Ford has always taken advantages of their six-sigma based operational model to
compete other global brands like Honda (Fadly Habidin and Mohd Yusof 2013). In USA and
Europe, the level of competition of these two companies is very high, while causing a high
bargaining power of potential customers. Before, 2005 Ford had significant advantage over