Production Process of Honda Vehicles

INTRODUCTION

The production process involved in the manufacturing of all vehicles is essentially the same be it that firm is producing heavy weight vehicles or light weight vehicles. Motor vehicles are assembled in factories, generally referred to as assembly plants, where thousands of parts and sub-assemblies come together on a production line. The production of a motor vehicle is a complex process but can be generally be classified into four steps which are the press division, welding division, paint division and finally the assembly division (Rogowsky 2002). This paper is going to specifically focus on discussing the production process of Honda vehicles where they manufacture the new Civic Models. In discussing this production process all the range of operation management tools are going to be demonstrated, then giving a sound explanation of materials resource planning followed by how enterprise resource planning would be done at the firm and link this to the value chain. It could be stated that Honda uses the same production process as Toyota car manufacturers as most approaches are lean manufacturing which is from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

It is important to first understand what production process and operations management are before going in depth with the production process of Honda vehicles. According to Porter (2011), operations management is that part of the business that manages and ensures that goods and services are produced to meet the customer requirements. The most commonly accepted definition of a production process is that it is concerned with transforming a range of inputs into outputs that are required by the customers or the market (Porter 2011). In essence with the combination of these two it could be seen that operations management manages the production process of any kind of good or service.

Material Logistic Division

According to Honda (2013), the first phase of the production process of the company starts with the...