Today our class visited the Honda Power Equipment factory in Swepsonville, North Carolina. The Honda plant was established in 1953 and since then it has manufactured over 40 million power products worldwide. Currently Honda is the leader of developing fuel efficient, low emission, and environmentally friendly engines for power equipments including lawn mowers, snow throwers, and other. The Honda Power Equipment is headquartered out of Alpharetta, Georgia. Honda Power Equipment or HPE offers more than 60 models in six major product families, including, generators, lawn mowers, pumps, snow blowers, tillers, and trimmers.
Hond Power Equipment did not have a very specific mission but David Werden, our guide during the tour, put a lot of emphasis on respect between all the employees and their three joys which were; buying, selling, and creating. As a company they do not believe in laying off their employees. Their assembly lines are very schedule driven, they try to make as many engines as they need, no extra. Our guide mentioned that everyone is moving in the assembly line, he compared it to an ant farm. Also another important value Honda believes in is safety and David Werden stated that it rarely ever happens that a factory worker gets seriously injured.
The Honda Power costumers include their stores and Home Depot stores. Home Depot is by far they’re largest customer but Honda Power Equipment also serves single product customers in their own stores. Also HPE sells generators to some of their competitors in the lawn mower business. David Werden mentioned that it was “a unique situation” when he was talking about selling to their competitors. Honda Power Equipment customers value getting cutting edge or top of the line equipment with exceptional quality. Also Punctuality is very important to their customers especially Home Depot who always needs a specific amount usually they want more of a surplus but they just don’t want to run out of lawn mowers.
Honda Power Equipment’s results are extraordinarily high, in the year of 2013 they had just under 300 million dollars in sales. Consumer Reports even rated the Honda Power Equipment lawn mowers the number one lawn mower on the market for nine straight years. HPE contains ten manufacturing facilities around the globe not including the United States. HPE’s plan for the future is to keep doing what they’re doing because they have been extremely successful over the past couple of years. Also HPE is trying to move their products that are manufactured where the demand is the highest to cut down costs. Moving their generators from Japan to the United States will help them do this. Overall I really enjoyed the visit and the presentation that David Werden gave us was very informative. Also I was very impressed at how clean their factory was compared to other factories.
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