Blogs and Casestudies

I stumbled upon a 50-year-old motorcycle outside a beer garden in my hometown, which led me down the most fascinating rabbit hole about a company since I wrote about Lockheed—this time, it’s about Honda. But let’s start where it all began: manufacturing. Optimizing manufacturing is always about eliminating the seven wastes, or as Honda calls them, the “seven muda.”

The first type of waste is “overprocessing,” which happens when we finish a part to a higher standard than necessary.

Next is the waste of “superfluous inventory,” which means having more parts on hand than we currently need. This can lead to the waste of “transportation”—if I receive more raw materials than needed, I’ll have to pointlessly ship them back to storage. A related issue is the waste of “overproduction,” where more is produced than the next stage of production requires.

The risk here is a waste of time—if the downstream process is overloaded, I’ll be left waiting while they work through their excess inventory. If they rush to catch up, it increases the risk of producing defective parts, leading to waste, as everything upstream becomes useless.

The worst waste is “propagation.” If I approve a flawed workflow and make it the standard operating procedure, I’ll end up multiplying all these small inefficiencies across a thousand employees.This might sound overly meticulous, but during World War II in Japan, it was crucial. Soichiro Honda’s factory was bombed in 1944, making it impossible to store large amounts of inventory.

He sold the remains of that company in 1945 for the equivalent of $3,000. With no capital available, they had to sell a finished product to finance the raw materials for the next one.

Honda’s “A-Type” was actually built by just 12 people in a tiny 16-square-meter workshop.

There was only space for the parts being worked on at the moment, which turned out to be a good thing because demand in postwar Japan was very low. Trying to mass-produce items and push them onto a struggling market would have led to bankruptcy. So, Honda had to rely on consumer pull, producing motorcycles just in time to be sold. This approach, known as Just-in-Time Manufacturing, was later adopted by the global auto industry, but it originally came out of necessity in war-ravaged Japan.

Just-in-Time Manufacturing is made possible by the principles of the 5S methodology.

seiri (整理), seiton (整頓), seisō (清掃), seiketsu (清潔), and shitsuke (躾)

seiri is to sort out to remove anything unnecessary from your workstation.

seiton is to set in order so if you need a foot stool put it by your left foot now we have only the items that we need right where we need them.

seisō is often translated as "shine" for alliterative accentuation but it really means to keep tidy. Honda's Benchmark was that a person with no experience from 15 meter away within 5 seconds should be able to tell when something is out of place. That's how clean the workstation is supposed to be. And of course such cleanliness is only possible with...

...seiketsu a standardization of cleanliness. And when there is a standard it becomes automatic for supervisor to hold staff accountable.

There is however one greater S. shitsuke to sustain by personal discipline. The 5s's they're meant to be each employees personal concern and that way they're maintained whether anyone is around to enforce them or not and such individual authority at every level of production is the real discipline.

The 5S methodology makes it easy for any employee, at any level, to spot when something is wrong. Since manufacturing is done just in time, improvements can be applied to the very next part in line. This is exactly how Honda operated. For example, on the CB 350, the swing arm had a plate welded to it to hold the axle, which was standard practice. However, on the CB 400 Four, a line worker noticed that the part being welded was tapered and could simply be pressed into the carrier plate instead. Honda implemented that change immediately.

Another example is the small retainer loop on the brake pedal. A test rider once got his foot caught between the brake pedal and the engine case, so he suggested adding the loop. Later, another test rider got his pant leg caught in the loop and recommended enlarging it and spacing the pedal 4mm further from the engine. So starting from engine number 1084315, that's what Honda did.

Or consider the ergonomics: as a 6’3” German, I feel a bit cramped with the rear sets and low handlebars. Honda’s North American marketing team noticed this issue too. Starting from frame number 1056883, Honda made changes, offering more forward foot pegs and higher handlebars. The constant challanging of the status quo in order to make things better, are part of a philosophy called Kaizen—‘Kai’ meaning continuous change and ‘Zen’ meaning for the better. This approach led to three iterations of the CB 400 Four in just three years, contributing to its remarkable reliability even five decades later.

To a Westerner, it might seem wasteful to improve something three times only to eventually abandon it. However, Honda approached it differently. After three years, they noticed that the engines had developed a rattling sound. To address this, they used a quality control technique called the “Five Whys,” which helps identify the root cause of a problem.

The engine is rattling …

why? because the cam chain is loose

why? because the horseshoe tensioner is seized

why? because the chain was rubbing up against the tensioner pivot

why? because the owner failed to keep it tight enough

why? because the port is located right behind the tire, it tends to get clogged with dirt, and most owners didn’t bother keeping up with the maintenance schedule.

You can see how Honda uses the five Whys to get down to the root of the problem and then solve that, but when the root of the problem is that consumers are stupid, Honda will typically just abandon the part and replace it with something that is better designed for human nature like the more idiot proof tensioner on the CB650 that came after this.

A 50-year-old Honda runs great because the desolation of World War II pressed Honda into Just in Time Manufacturing, because JIT is only possible if your workforce is tuned to the 5S's and because 5S naturally illuminates Kaizen - challenging of the status quo.

Have a good week 👋