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| The Honda Heritage Center in Marysville, Ohio, houses a museum and some business offices. |
by Lindsay Chappell of
www.autonews.com
The three largest Japanese automakers are similar in a lot of ways.
But when it comes to managing North America, Honda Motor Co. is
following a different drummer.
Toyota and Nissan are through with suburban Los Angeles for their North American headquarters, but Honda is not.
While
Honda has brought together 600 employees and executives in Ohio, the
company still has 2,500 employees in California with no intention of
moving them, says Jeffrey Smith, chief spokesman for Honda North
America.
"We are investing in California, not divesting," Smith says.
Honda
recently completed renovations to its headquarters in Torrance, Calif.,
modernizing the company cafeteria that feeds 2,500 sales and marketing
employees daily. It also built an interactive display in the
headquarters lobby to let visitors experience the Honda and Acura
brands, Smith says.
Suspicions that Honda would follow Nissan and
Toyota entirely away from the coast -- emboldened by Mercedes-Benz
USA's relocation this year from New Jersey to Atlanta -- have not been
borne out.
Smith says: "The current organization is working very well, and we have no plans to change our current direction."
A
little over a year ago, Honda quietly opened an office building on the
grounds of its big vehicle assembly plant in Marysville, Ohio, that
illustrates just how different its thinking is from that of Toyota and
Nissan.
In addition to a museum that is open to the public, the
Honda Heritage Center also now houses 600 employees, including
executives who manage some -- but not all -- business functions for
North America. Those employees were gathered over the past two years
from several existing Honda sites in an effort to coordinate services
and planning for a growing list of Honda operations.
Those
operations include the workaday aspects of running a complex automaker:
human resources, legal affairs, production planning, finance, purchasing
and information systems. But the more high-profile business of sales
and marketing for the Honda and Acura brands remains firmly rooted in
Torrance, Smith says.
That contrasts with Toyota, now one year
away from completing its centralized North American headquarters
building near Dallas. The first 400 Toyota staffers have relocated from
Los Angeles.
Nissan relocated from Southern California to
Nashville in 2006 amid some industry skepticism that it was making a
mistake. Since then, Nissan North America's U.S. market share has grown
from 6.3 percent (2005) to 8.5 percent (2015), and its Nashville
headcount has grown to 1,700, up from 1,300 when the company was
headquartered in suburban Los Angeles.
Unlike Nissan, Honda doesn't plan to relocate its entire management team.
In
early 2013, Honda announced it would move four dozen employees from
Torrance to Marysville to join a new entity called Honda North America
Services. Among those expected to relocate was Honda's top North
American executive at the time, Tetsuo Iwamura. But one year later,
Iwamura moved to a new position, and his successor, Takuji Yamada, chose
not to have his office full-time in Ohio.
Yamada alternates
between Torrance and the Ohio office. Other North American management
leaders also alternate between two locations. The Marysville location
also serves as a meeting point for North American strategy planning
sessions, with executives coming in from diverse offices.
Smith
notes that the 600 employees in the Heritage Center are only part of the
newer corporate services team. Another 600 members of the group work at
other Honda sites around Ohio. And 250 more work in offices in
California, Detroit, New York, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
"We're really looking for ways to operate the most efficiently as we continue growing," Smith says.
The
role of the Heritage Center team is not to consolidate management in a
single spot, he says, but to serve as a "link" to the various Honda
operations around the country, "to work as one Honda team."
Source;
http://www.autonews.com/article/20160125/OEM/301259964/honda-makes-moves-but-will-stay-in-california
