The Association for Manufacturing Excellence

THE ASSOC I AT ION FOR MANUFACTUR ING EXCELLENCE Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) was the hot topic and many new software programs were being developed and marketed. APICS was essentially the professional MRP society. Because MRP came from a job shop environment of work order and push systems, mass production environments struggled to accommodate the paper blizzard that MRP created. A special interest group within APICS, called the Repetitive Manufacturing Group (RMG), formed to consider the problems and find solutions. “Some of these early folks included Mac McCullough (Briggs & Stratton) and Doc Hall (Indiana University). At the same time, Doc and others had been exposed to ‘Japanese Manufacturing’– which according to the early RMG members, was ‘eating our lunch while we talked about MRP.’ “In September 1980, Arthur Andersen and Ford Motor Company held a five-day workshop on Just-in-Time (JIT) and the manufacturing news was grim: Chrysler in bankruptcy, machine tools going down the tubes, and electronics beginning to hurt. Xerox found itself paying more to suppliers for the materials in a copier than the price charged to customers for a similar unit by Japanese competitors. In October 1980, the RMG co-sponsored, with Arthur Andersen, the first-known conference in the U.S. on Japanese Manufacturing at the Ford World Headquarters Auditorium, with Fujio Cho – then chairman of Toyota, as the featured speaker. Five hundred people attended this event. It was a wakeup call for all attendees and it spurred the RMG to action. “Over the next several years, the sharing of activities at manufacturing sites grew, and by January 1983, the APICS Zero Inventories Crusade officially launched. As the movement grew, APICS and RMG separated, and by October 1984, plans were drawn up to become an independent association. The original name selected was the Association for Manufacturing Excellence Through Just-in-Time – although the ‘Through Just-in-Time’ was quickly dropped.