The Ford mantra: There is never enough time or money to do it right, but we always can find the time and money to do it over.
6,000 TVM items implemented per year
4,000 did not provide a net savings
One $0.30 TVM project led to a $5m recall
Significant amounts of money and resources have been wasted in retooling and revalidating our products for no benefit to our customers. It is certain that these actions have contributed to quality issues we are seeing today.
TVM is wooden nickels!!!!!!
TVM is a waste of time.
Let cost ops follow all changes and audit final tooling to berify content..
Too simple eh?
It’s not just a Ford thing.
Why pay the skilled and experienced well to do it right once, when you can pay the inadequates two or there’s times over - to eventually get it right.
A lesson management will never learn. Anything to save a nickel.
TVM are still alive and kicking with very aggressive cost cutting targets for ICE products. Every idea is on table as long as they TAR out. Also, there is limited validation testing, all validation is using CAE models even if they are not correlated with experimental data. Chief Engineers are being pitbulls pushing for ideas or else.
The reward system is messed up at Ford. They spin up massive teams to do things that can be automated with a little bit of thought and code. Meanwhile they pinch pennies on parts.
They claim they can’t implement automation for all sorts of reasons.
Two of the favorites are: that can’t be done because the automation crosses functional group boundaries, and we can’t do that because we would lose checks and balances. Translation: we would have to dismantle (fire) multiple groups that we built solely to have a reason to give ourselves promotions.
Everyone who has spoken up about the insane amount of waste is laid off.
I dont even think you know the half of it. I think we all have seen this. Few years ago I saw a cost save idea go thru on one of out most important products. Only to get recalled about 6 months later and cost the company millions. And lots of bad press in the enthusiast forums.