Japan was kicking our manufacturing ability in the tail in the 70’ laregely because they learned Continuous Process Improvement... see Demming. Detroit laughed him outta town...the Japanese listened.
Old news... not just Kaizen (the Japanese thang about continuous improvement that they didn't need to learn from us) but SPC (statistical process control) and more statistical QC technology after Deming that all helped. Don't get sucked into the "they beat us fair" meme... currency exchange rate and tariffs made a huge difference in their favor back then, still not completely level.
We still did (do) pretty damn good considering the stacked deck for all these decades, and we are helping poor nations get less poor, while unskilled laborers here don't feel very charitable about that wealth transfer from their paychecks.
JR
PS: I once got in trouble at a supervisors meeting (in my last day job) when our fearless leader declared that the recovery of our domestic passenger car business was because they finally embraced quality control.
. I was dumb enough to point out the huge tariffs on imported vehicles, which is also why japan moved brands upscale (to support the high tariffs with higher list prices) and then later built their own pickup truck factories here. The US tariff on imported light trucks is something like 25% still (fair?) which explains why detroit likes selling us big expensive pickup trucks, instead of small cars...
PPS: The only reason I moved to MS was because the consumer electronics business was already lost to the Japanese so I decided to make a last stand in the sound reinforcement business. Ironic perhaps that Peavey eventually ended up sending me to China to help set up manufacturing there. I have met the enemy and he is me.
