Production

Honda Motor Co. Within a year of launching the Odyssey minivan in 1998, Honda turned around and launched the Acura MDX above at its plant in Alliston, Ontario without quality setbacks.

Quality, flexibility give Honda edge

Wider variety of vehicles offered

By Joe Miller / The Detroit News

    ALLISTON, Ontario — In the rural town of Alliston, Ontario — better known for its sod and potato farms — 20 robots pull together the skeletal body of a Honda Odyssey minivan, fixing the main sections in place with 137 welds.

    Some 10 minutes later, with the ease of switching channels on a television, the robots reposition themselves to piece together the shorter Acura MDX, a new luxury sport-utility vehicle.

    “We just switch to another channel and the robots go to another location,” said Charles Chadwick, general manager of Honda Motor Co.’s Alliston operation. “All that has to be changed out to go from one model to another are very simple holding fixtures that hold the parts.”

    To the layman, that might not mean much. But for competitive automakers eager to keep the pipeline full of popular vehicles, it’s as close to the Holy Grail as you can get. The approach also provides a significant leg up for Honda over its U. S. rivals.

    As customer tastes become more and more unpredictable, Honda is hedging its bets by making its assembly plants flexible enough to build a wider variety of vehicles. Around the globe, the Japanese automaker is installing the same automated welding robots, as well as other common machinery and techniques in each of its plants.

Honda Odyssey Honda’s first attempt to market a minivan in the United States fell short. The original Odyssey, left, was underpowered and overpriced, but still a quality standout.

    At the same time, the automaker is designing future vehicles so they can be built in any Honda plant, avoiding the old industry practice of overhauling the way it builds cars for every redesign.

    Honda believes it will better handle changes in the marketplace by introducing new and redesigned vehicles more quickly and without spending hundreds of millions of dollars to retool plants.

    The changes will make it easier for Honda to move production of popular vehicles to underutilized plants.

    By 2004, Honda says its new flexible manufacturing system will help it save almost $1 billion a year.

    The ambitious goal is certain to grab the attention of Detroit’s automakers, who find themselves saddled with too many assembly plants dedicated to a single style of vehicle.

    Flexible plants that build multiple vehicles aren’t new to GM and Ford, but they often suffer from spotty quality and require unscheduled overtime to meet regular production quotas.

    “Honda has been very methodical in how they’ve set up their North American production system,” said Michael Robinet, an industry analyst with CSM Worldwide Inc. in Northville. “They really have the ability to produce anything in any facility. It’s the beauty of their production system.”

    Although Honda has won praise over the years for its manufacturing and engineering prowess, the Japanese automaker discovered in 1996 — with the launch of the CR-V sport-utility — that it needed to get even better.

    Honda expected to sell about 40,000 CR-Vs in the United States. Demand, however, turned out to be far greater. With no ability to expand its existing CR-V plant in Japan, Honda was forced to convert another of its Japanese factories to build the CR-V.

    The move proved costly and the CR-V experience caused Honda to rethink its entire manufacturing system.

    Honda’s first major opportunity to become more flexible came in Alliston, where the automaker was building a second plant to produce
a redesigned Honda Odyssey. The original Odyssey, introduced in 1994 and built in Japan, was too small, underpowered and overpriced for the American market. It was a poor competitor against stalwarts such as the Dodge Caravan and Ford Windstar.

    The new Odyssey, larger and with a more powerful engine, became an immediate top seller for Honda. In 2000, the Odyssey became the No. 3 selling minivan in the country behind the Caravan and Windstar. To meet growing demand, Honda will open a new Odyssey plant in Alabama next year.

    But if Odyssey sales fall off, Honda has a backup plan: the Acura MDX.

    Introduced this fall, the luxury sport-utility is built on the same assembly line as the Odyssey in Alliston, the first North American plant that builds minivans and SUVs. Although there are no plans to build the MDX in Alabama, Honda officials say they could easily move the SUV production down south.

    The Alliston and Alabama factories will also be able to build a new version of the Honda Passport beginning in late 2002, analysts say. The current Passport, based on the Isuzu Rodeo and assembled in Lafayette, Ind., will be discontinued after 2002.

    Honda has introduced the same flexibility at its three North American car plants: a factory in Alliston, where it makes the Honda Civic; another Civic plant in East Liberty, Ohio, and its Honda Accord-Acura TL and CL plant in Marysville, Ohio.

    “If market demand changes and they need to make Accords or Acura models (at East Liberty) and we want to swing some of the Civic production up here (to Alliston), it’d be very easy to do,” Chadwick said.

    The key, according to Sandy Munro, an automotive consultant in Troy, is to be clever in the design of vehicles and the selection of parts suppliers.

    “You have to think about how you’re going to do this way up stream. That’s where Honda does a very good job,” Munro said.

    Putting different vehicles on the same assembly line also means more opportunities for mistakes. Honda, with its reputation for high quality at stake, has added additional quality controls at its plants.

    At Alliston, for example, workers go over each Odyssey and MDX at eight quality checkpoints along the assembly line. Afterward, Chadwick said he tries to check each vehicle personally.

    “The challenges that face us ahead require a lot of flexibility. The secret is to keep that quality and introduce as much flexibility as possible,” Chadwick said.

    That has customers such as John Ford, 38, of Louisville, Ky., coming back to Honda. Ford recently bought an MDX, his fourth Acura, because of Honda’s reputation for “workmanship, engineering and quality parts.”

    “I was a little skeptical about the MDX, as this is my first Acura that has not been built in Japan,” Ford said. “I have not been disappointed thus far.”

You can reach Joe Miller at (313) 223-3217 or jmiller@detnews.com.