ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 traces a typical work day (i.e., the set of work tasks conducted in the morning, daytime, and evening) of a Japanese production process engineer at a plant of the benchmark J car component firm. The main tasks of the production process engineer are the preparation of new production lines and the improvement of existing production lines. As a whole, the engineer generally spends more of his working time on production improvement than on production preparation. The production improvement tasks mainly consist of troubleshooting and cost-reduction efforts. In this chapter, three examples of daytime work performed by the engineer are examined in detail: troubleshooting with workers, troubleshooting with suppliers, and management of the start-up stage of mass production.
