A sign of leadership is owning up to mistakes and working on game plan to fix them instead of making excuses or pushing them off to the next CEO. Pushing problems down to dealership and sales reps was never sustainable and Ford seems to have a good game plan for setting itself up to be able to compete, for consumer and shareholder expectations for excellence. The next couple of years will be interesting to see how their quality fixes unfold. "You have to set up a culture shift, a performance reward system where every engineering manager, purchasing component manager, every plant manager is fully accountable for the quality and cost of their work. We're still not at the world-class levels that, not only our customers expect, but, more importantly, what we expect out of ourselves." CEO - Jim Farley
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/15/ford-jim-farley-quality-issues
Launch and Line Quality Changes:
"The capability atrophied in engineering, supply chain and manufacturing at Ford," Farley said.
Having worked in the auto industry I have had the pleasure of working with former Ford folks and great talent is there, just matter of unleashing it in the right way. This industry is a pressure cooker, but customer feedback is gold that helps drive innovation and a higher standard of quality. As owners, keep your expectations high and keep providing feedback to Ford, it matters. The adults in the room at Ford appreciate it.
https://www.axios.com/2024/02/15/ford-jim-farley-quality-issues
Launch and Line Quality Changes:
- "We have a 25-mile pre-delivery quality shakedown" — where employees drive the vehicle 25 miles and scrutinize its performance as a customer might — "and we drove 28,000 Super Dutys, and 100 more each day to assure quality of the product. We pre-drove every vehicle to find any kind of defect.
- "We now have added higher mileage, real-world testing during the launch. We have tripled the number of trucks in trailer towing tests, which is really critical to Super Duty. That's nearly four times as many as we typically do in our durability testing.
- "We now have a lot more quality checks on the product line in both (factory) locations. We've added now AI (artificial intelligence) on the line to catch quality issues that aren't visible to the human eye.
- "Simply put, you are not going to see us launch product until it meets or exceeds the highest quality standards that we've ever had. This is what we're doing for all vehicles, like we're going through now for (the new) Mustang and other upcoming exciting products."
- "For our management team, quality is our No. 1 priority. And our overall quality today is improving. However, we're still not at the world-class levels that, not only our customers expect, but, more importantly, what we expect out of ourselves."
- "We are starting to see our initial quality improve markedly in North America. We're taking a range of actions, as you would expect, to eliminate any defects in the first place. And we are totally focused on finding and fixing issues that do come up. The way we portray this inside the company is, we always want to put quality first because that's the most fundamental commitment to our customers, and our customers, we want to treat like family."
- "It requires a lot of end-to-end changes, from our supply chain, our manufacturing and engineering system, to the way we test, and also the way we find root cause and solve that across all the different disciplines in the industrial system. I want to give you maybe an example of what's changing at Ford, what we do differently."
"The capability atrophied in engineering, supply chain and manufacturing at Ford," Farley said.
Having worked in the auto industry I have had the pleasure of working with former Ford folks and great talent is there, just matter of unleashing it in the right way. This industry is a pressure cooker, but customer feedback is gold that helps drive innovation and a higher standard of quality. As owners, keep your expectations high and keep providing feedback to Ford, it matters. The adults in the room at Ford appreciate it.
