Harley Davidson’s Just-in-Time Essay Example for Free

Harley Davidson’s Just-in-Time Essay This case is about the Just-in-Time (JIT) implementation at Harley-Davidson Motor Company. After World War II, they faced  with  competition from Japanese companies, which were able to produce better quality motorcycles at comparatively lower cost. Harley-Davidson found that there were three most important practices of Japanese companies, which differentiated their production process from that of others: JIT manufacturing, employee involvement, and statistical process control. Harley-Davidson adopted those three principles and formulated different strategies to make this move possible and to make its manufacturing processes as efficient as that of its Japanese counterparts. The company finally succeeded in achieving its goals of reducing the cost of production, improving quality, and increasing its market share. With the company again getting into hard times, this case presents how it was trying to focus on â€Å"continuous improvement† in a bid to bring itself back into profits. Question #1: Why has continuous improvement been so successful at Harley Davidson? Continuous improvement is ongoing effort to improve products, services or processes. These efforts can seek â€Å"incremental† improvement over time or â€Å"breakthrough† improvement all at once. Under continuous improvement, a task or series of tasks were identified as the problem area in the business process, manufacturing operations, and product development where improvement could be made. Harley-Davidson required the active participation and commitment of its employees to help in eliminating unnecessary steps and complexity for the process and to bring more flexibility into the system. Continuous improvement helped the company identify savings opportunities and put those mechanisms into places, also improved the quality standards and the reduced the waste in the forms of cost, time and defects. Therefore with a year, all Harley-Davidson’s manufacturing operations were being converted to JIT: components and sub-assemblies were â€Å"pulled† through the production system in response to final demand. Question #2: Considering the road ahead, what specific actions can Harley Davidson take that will move them toward their goals? Harley Davidson could keep doing â€Å"continuous improvement. Take a closer look at its operations in a bid to get its cost structure right and manage shipments consistent with the expected slowing of consumer spending. For continuous improvement, its begins with identify the current process and take a vote on which process would most benefit from improvement, then map out the existing process using a project board like A3 report. After fully understand the process, identify areas of opportunity surrounding the mapped process, to do this teams should analyze the current process and scrutinize areas that may be streamlined. Finally, the team will decide on a new process. In order to reduce excess capacity or costs and gain efficiencies, the company has consolidated some of its production facilities, and parts, accessories and general merchandise distribution operations to improve its overall process. The company also made it a high priority to manage supply in line with demand. In addition, the company started restructuring its production process to reduce complexity and create the flexibility to produce multiple product families on the same assembly line every day at the beginning of 2009.

Educational Goals and Philosophy :: Personal Narrative Teaching Education Essays

Philosophy Declining, decaying, and disappearing are just a few of the words that can be used to explain the emphasis put on art programs in schools. Art is not seen as a necessity. Standardized tests are now dictating not only what is taught in school but what is more important to teach. Seldom do you see a question pertaining to art or even art’s history on a standardized test. I think that art is a very important subject. Not only does it act as a creative outlet allowing students to express feelings that may be forbidden to act on, but art is deeply rooted in our history from the cave paintings first found in France to the modern uses in advertisement. Our world would be boring without art right down to our cornflakes because they would no longer have a rooster on the box. The fact that I think that art is important is just one reason why I would like to be a teacher. More importantly, I want to do what I love and teach others how to do it as well. As generic as it may sound, I want to broaden students’ minds by teaching them that art is a serious creative process. I want them to understand that they can use it to speak, especially when they think no one is listening. In fact until recently, I never wanted to be a teacher at all. I wanted to be a doctor. However along the way, I have had so very inspiring teachers who had a great impact on me. I want to do what I love. I want to be around people, and I want to be around art. I am pursuing a degree in Art Education K-12 and plan to get a masters degree in art once I graduate from Concord College. My ultimate goal is to teach at a high school locally. I feel that the rural schools in this area do not challenge their students enough and do not provide them with information on the various opportunities available to them after graduation. I also realize that the local culture can be blind to the value of art. Educational Goals and Philosophy :: Personal Narrative Teaching Education Essays Philosophy Declining, decaying, and disappearing are just a few of the words that can be used to explain the emphasis put on art programs in schools. Art is not seen as a necessity. Standardized tests are now dictating not only what is taught in school but what is more important to teach. Seldom do you see a question pertaining to art or even art’s history on a standardized test. I think that art is a very important subject. Not only does it act as a creative outlet allowing students to express feelings that may be forbidden to act on, but art is deeply rooted in our history from the cave paintings first found in France to the modern uses in advertisement. Our world would be boring without art right down to our cornflakes because they would no longer have a rooster on the box. The fact that I think that art is important is just one reason why I would like to be a teacher. More importantly, I want to do what I love and teach others how to do it as well. As generic as it may sound, I want to broaden students’ minds by teaching them that art is a serious creative process. I want them to understand that they can use it to speak, especially when they think no one is listening. In fact until recently, I never wanted to be a teacher at all. I wanted to be a doctor. However along the way, I have had so very inspiring teachers who had a great impact on me. I want to do what I love. I want to be around people, and I want to be around art. I am pursuing a degree in Art Education K-12 and plan to get a masters degree in art once I graduate from Concord College. My ultimate goal is to teach at a high school locally. I feel that the rural schools in this area do not challenge their students enough and do not provide them with information on the various opportunities available to them after graduation. I also realize that the local culture can be blind to the value of art.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Essay

On September 24, 1896, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born to Edward Fitzgerald and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, the product of two vastly different Celtic strains. Edward, who came from tired, old Maryland stock and claimed distant kinship with the composer of â€Å"The Star Spangled Banner,† (Spencer, 367-81) instilled in his son the old-fashioned virtues of honor and courage and taught by example the beauty of genteel manners. Fitzgerald was smitten by the sophisticated sixteen-year-old at a St. Paul Christmas dance in 1914 during his sophomore year at Princeton. For the next two years, he conducted a one-sided romance both in person and through ardent correspondence with a girl who embodied his ideal of wealth and social position. Ginevra, however, was more interested in adding to her collection of suitors than in restricting herself to one. Legend has it, moreover, that Fitzgerald overheard someone, perhaps Ginevra’s father, remark that poor boys should never think of marrying rich girls. (Moreland, 25-38) By 1916, the romance had ended, but its effect lingered long in Fitzgerald’s psyche. Fitzgerald’s greatness lies as much in the conception as in the achievement. In this way Fitzgerald and his fiction capture some essential quality of the American myth and dream that were the focus his lifetime of personal and literary effort. Without doubt, Fitzgerald’s art was a response to his life. He immersed himself in his age and became its chief chronicler, bringing to his fiction a realism that gives it the quality of a photograph or, perhaps more appropriately, a documentary film. With the clothing, the music, the slang, the automobiles, the dances, the fads — in the specificity of its social milieu-Fitzgerald’s fiction documents a moment in time in all its historical reality. Yet Fitzgerald captures more than just the physical evidence of that time. He conveys with equal clarity the psychology (the dreams and hopes, the anxieties and fears) reflected in that world because he lived the life he recorded. Autobiography thus forms the basis of the social realism that is a hallmark of Fitzgerald’s fiction, but it is autobiography transmuted through the critical lens of both a personal and a cultural romantic sensibility, a second defining characteristic of his art. These two strands help to place Fitzgerald within American literary history. (Hindus, 45-50) Fitzgerald came to prominence as a writer in the 1920s, a period dominated by the postwar novel, and thus his fiction reflects all the contradictions of his age. World War I was a defining event for Fitzgerald and the writers of his generation whether or not they saw action in the field. Postwar developments on the home front contributed as well to the sense of purposelessness, decay, political failure, and cultural emptiness that pervades the literature of the 1920s. A new conservatism dominated America. Fitzgerald’s fiction of the 1920s reveals the tensions inherent in this mixture of anxious longing for the old certainties and heady excitement at the prospect of the new, just as his fiction of the 1930s captures the human cost — the wasted potential and psychic dislocation — of the gay, gaudy spree and its subsequent crash. His critics argue that he is no more than a stylish chronicler of his age, a mere recorder of the fashions and amusements, the manners and mores of his postwar generation, and he is certainly that. Yet verisimilitude, the truthful rendering of experience, is a distinguishing feature of realistic fiction, and particularly of the novel of manners, a literary form that examines a people and their culture in a specific time and place and a category into which much of Fitzgerald’s fiction fits. Thus, Fitzgerald’s ability to convey accurately his own generation is not necessarily a weakness. Fitzgerald’s lyricism and symbolist mode of writing reveal an essentially romantic sensibility that not only gives shape to his worldview, linking it to some traditional attitudes about the individual and human existence, but also supports his thematic preoccupations. Critics who complain of Fitzgerald’s inability to evaluate the world that he so brilliantly records (and the life that he so intensely lived) need look no further than his third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), for proof of his double consciousness. Increasingly aware of the complex social, psychic, and economic forces that were driving his generation to excess and emptiness, Fitzgerald found the literary forms to give them expression in a novel that is now considered a modern masterpiece. Through his indirect, often ironic first-person narrative, Fitzgerald was able to give the story of Jay Gatsby, a man who reinvents himself to capture a dream, sad nobility, and the novel’s complex symbolic landscape reinforces this view. Gatsby may initially be just another corrupt product of his material world, but through the eyes of Nick Carraway, readers gradually come to see him as a romantic idealist who has somehow managed, despite his shadowy past and equally shady present, to remain uncorrupted. Fitzgerald’s complex symbolic landscape also elevates Gatsby’s quest to the realm of myth, the myth of the American Dream, and thus the novel offers a critical perspective on a nation and a people as well as on a generation. When E Scott Fitzgerald died in December 1940, his reputation was that of a failed writer who had squandered his talent in drink and excess. He may have written the novel that defined a decade, This Side of Paradise ( 1920), and another that exposed the dreams and illusions of a nation, The Great Gatsby ( 1925), but his achievement had been overshadowed and largely blighted by his life. (Frohock, 220-28) Works Cited Frohock W. M. â€Å"Morals, Manners, and Scott Fitzgerald†. Southwest Review 40( 1955): 220-228. Hindus Milton. F. Scott Fitzgerald: An Introduction and Interpretation. New York: Holt, 1968. 45-50 Moreland Kim. â€Å"The Education of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Lessons in the Theory of History†. Southern Humanities Review 19(1985): 25-38. Spencer Benjamin T. â€Å"Fitzgerald and the American Ambivalence†. South Atlantic Quarterly 66( 1967): 367-381. Appendix LITERARY WORKS BY F. SCOTT FITZGERALD This Side of Paradise. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920; Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Flappers and Philosophers. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920. The Beautiful and Damned. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922; Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Tales of the Jazz Age. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. The Vegetable; Or, from President to Postman. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923. The Great Gatsby. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925; Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. All the Sad Young Men. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926. Tender is the Night. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934; Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995. Taps at Reveille. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935. POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS The Last Tycoon. Ed. Edmund Wilson. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941; The Love of the Last Tycoon. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1994. The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Malcolm Cowley. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951. Afternoon of an Author. Ed. Arthur Mizener. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957. Babylon Revisited and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960. Six Tales of the Jazz Age and Other Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960. Pat Hobby Stories. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1909-1917. Ed. John Kuehl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965. The Basil and Josephine Stories. Ed. Jackson R. Bryer and John Kuehl. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. Bits of Paradise: 21 Uncollected Stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s St. Paul Plays, 1911-1914. Ed. Alan Margolies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Library, 1978. The Price Was High: The Last Uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A New Collection. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.

Adam Smith The Father Of Modern Economics And Capitalism

Ethan Sattler Carolyn Crumpler World History 7 April 2014 Adam Smith was an influential 18th century philosopher who many consider to be the â€Å"father of modern economics and capitalism.† Born in 1723 in Scotland, he was one of the greatest classical liberal thinkers of all time. He is best known for his works The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. His ideas were developed during the mid-1700s, during the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution was one of the largest social, political, and economic shifts in human history. Economic systems during the Industrial Revolution shifted from mercantilism to laissez-faire capitalism, which allowed for competition between rival businesses. Independent (non-state owned) companies thrived by expanding into new markets, and investing in production efficiency. Large technological advances and new production concepts such as the assembly line and mass agricultural production lowered prices on goods and services. Smith’s ideas have been implemented continuo usly from the 1760s to the present. Adam Smith’s views on social and economic policy are the cornerstones of the classical liberal ideology. His positions on taxes, trade, regulation, and the role of government have had a profound impact on the United States, and the rest of the world. I. Adam Smith and Taxes: Adam Smith, a fierce capitalist, believed in a less intrusive and smaller government with the lowest taxes possible. Despite his belief thatShow MoreRelatedThe Biography Of Adam Smith1505 Words   |  7 PagesThe Biography of Adam Smith Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland in the year 1923, and died in the year 1790 at the age of 67 (Stewart, 1861). His exact date of birth is unknown but was baptized on 5th June 1723. His father was a prosecutor, advocate, and solicitor but passed on two months after his birth, leaving his mother to bring him up. 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