CASE STUDY: FORD AND HONDA

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 716.

E Using a dictionary

A dictionary such as the Longman Business English Dictionary can help you to expand your vocabulary. Try these two exercises.

1. The word business is used several times in the article combined with another word which comes after it, e.g. business environment. It can also be combined with words that come before it, e.g. big business. Try to think of as many word combinations using business as you can, then look at the entry for business in the Longman Business English Dictionary.

Haig Simonian on two car groups' different routes to the global market

Rising costs and the worldwide spread of shared tastes in car styling have prompted the indus­try's giants to exploit global economies of scale. But rivals such as Ford and Honda have approached the task very differ­ently.

Ford is one of the world's earliest multinationals. Its first foreign production unit was set up in Canada in 1904 - just a year after the creation of the US parent. For years Ford operated on a regional basis. Individual countries or areas had a large degree of auton­omy from the US headquarters. That meant products differed sharply, depending on local executives' views of regional require­ments. In Europe the company built different cars in the UK and Germany until the late 1960s.

Honda, by contrast, is a much younger company, which grew rapidly from making motorcycles in the 1950s. In contrast to Ford, Honda was run very firmly out of Japan. Until well into the 1980s, its vehicles were designed, engi­neered and built in Japan for sale around the world.

Significantly, however, Honda tended to be more flexible than Ford in developing new products. Rather than having a structure based on independent functional departments, such as bodywork or engines, all Japan's car makers preferred multi-disciplinary teams. That allowed development work to take place simultaneously, rather than being passed between departments. It also allowed much greater responsiveness to change.

In the 1990s both companies started to amend their organisa­tional structures to exploit the per­ceived strengths of the other. At Ford, Alex Trotman, the newly appointed chairman, tore up the company's rulebook in 1993 to create a new organisation. The Ford 2000 restructuring programme threw out the old func­tional departments and replaced them with multi-disciplinary prod­uct teams.

Honda, by contrast, has decen­tralised in recent years. While its cars have much the same names around the world, they are becoming less, rather than more, stan­dardised. “Glocalisation” - a global strategy with local management - is the watchword. Eventually the group expects its structure will so comprise four regions - Japan, the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific -which will become increasingly self-sufficient.

Two reasons explain Honda's new approach. Shifting to produc­tion overseas in the past decade has made the company more attuned to regional tastes. About lm of Honda's 2.1m worldwide car sales last year were produced in the US. A further 104,000 were made in the UK. No other manu­facturer has such a high propor­tion of foreign output.

Honda engineers also reckon they can now devise basic engi­neering structures which are com­mon enough to allow significant economies of scale, but sufficiently flexible to be altered to suit regional variations. The US Accord, for example, is longer and wider than the Japanese version. The European one may have the 105 same dimensions as the Japanese model, but has different styling and suspension settings.

Both Ford and Honda argue their new structures represent a HO correct response to the demands of the global market. Much of what they have done is similar, but intriguingly, a lot remains differ­ent.

From the Financial Times