Toyota supplier quality crisis (1990s)

1990s Columbus, Ohio. A Tier-1 supplier to Honda/GM/Ford/Chrysler arrived 45 minutes late to a dinner because Toyota had summoned him to fix a parts problem same-day. Used to contrast Japanese collaborative supplier management with GM's adversarial "fix it by 9 AM or we sue" approach.

But people had learned by watching the Japanese — that's not the way the Japanese did it. The Japanese made the suppliers control the quality and certify that parts were good. In the 1990s I was in Columbus, Ohio to give a talk to a group at dinner. The head of this group was a supplier of parts to Honda, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — lots of automotive plants in the Midwest. We started dinner at six o'clock, and he didn't show up until 6:45, when they were serving dessert. He was all apologetic — he had gotten a call from Toyota that morning at 11, and they said, we have a problem with your parts, be up here at one o'clock. His office was two hours away from the Toyota plant, so they were basically saying leave right now and come see us. He had been in a meeting all afternoon with Toyota on how to fix the problem.