When you need someone to save your forging enterprise or contract manufacturer and help you implement the world-class methods and principles that will see your production quality up, waste down, and performing at the level your business requires to both survive and thrive.
Learn MoreMitoe Taira’s [Mee-toh-eh Ta-ee-rah] Taira Tanzo Inc. consistently used the least raw material in the world for their output while delivering ultra-high quality forged products to customers in the world's shortest processing time. Japanese style lean manufacturing coupled with revolutionary process innovations help Taira change the face of Forge management.
Until Mitoe Taira’s process innovations, it wasn’t possible to finish forged products to exacting size specs and required a lengthy finishing process involving a labor-intensive grinding process to size down the product to the necessary dimensions. The Mitoe Taira Process minimizes this time and resource waste and ushered us into a new era of lean Forging.
After taking over the company under extreme conditions, Mitoe Taira’s Taira Tanzo Inc. grew to export forged products based on massive demands from Mexico to the United States market, to Russia for the European market, to Brazil, India, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Singapore, growing in leaps and bounds with every delivered final product.
Companies around the world chose Mitoe Taira’s Taira Tanzo Inc.'s forged products for these same two reasons:
"We’ve never found a forging company that can produce this quality, at this speed."
"We’ve never found a forged product that can be used with the original forged black surface (surface as forged); the end product is sublime **"
When Mitoe Taira took over Taira Tanzo Inc., the proud traditional forging enterprise had zero in cash reserves and plans to shutter rather than burdening the next generation with a company that wasn’t profitable. After fighting for her right to keep the company going and conducting a process overhaul and implementing the Mitoe Taira Process, under Mitoe Taira, Taira Tanzo Inc. grew to have 5 billion Yen ($46 Million USD) in liquid assets, 7 billion Yen ($64 Million USD) in annual sales and had grown into a company with an 80% capital-to-asset ratio.
In June 2021, Mitoe Taira sold all her shares in Taira Tanzo Inc., to a Japanese listed corporation for more than 11.3 billion Yen ($103 Million USD), retaining all her intellectual property and process rights.
Mitoe Taira then established Improvements Co., Ltd. a consulting firm developed to help her bring the Mitoe Taira Process of Lean Forging to the manufacturing industry and the manufacturers in need of this process innovation.
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To raise the international forging industry’s industry standards
To bring ‘surfaced as forged’ (black surface forging) innovation to the entire forging industry and to promote production process and management improvements leading to less waste and shorter production times as she rolls out the Mitoe Taira Process industry-wide and establishes a new standard of forge management.
Many business and management consultants and consulting firms have little real business experience, a paper MBA, and can only recommend cost cutting measures like massive layoffs and outsourcing to cheaper, undermanaged manufacturing overseas often resulting in a noticeable drop in employee motivation, quality, and growth.
Mitoe Taira’s Improvements Co., Ltd.’s mission is to best advise your enterprise on how to adapt your current infrastructure to bring it to peak performance, based on maximizing your hard and soft assets.
As a tried-and-tested Forging expert, Improvements Co., Ltd. will analyze your current issues and advise you on the shortest, most effective route to becoming a ‘surfaced as forged’ (black surface forging) forge including advising on forging machinery, dies, based on their original know-how.
Taira and Improvements Co., Ltd.’s individual brand of Kaizen will also examine your human resources and greatly improve their production output using our methods that identify and solve production bottlenecks without expensive manpower outlays.
We can also achieve these results with your China-based production and facilities. We have those successes under our belt.
Utilizing her experience and wanting to share her revolutionary process reformations with the industry, published by Diamond Printing, Mitoe Taira’s self-penned book [Why could this president sell a company worth nothing for 10 billion yen ($91 Million USD)?], which achieved first place sales in the Operations / Practical Management Leadership category on Amazon Japan, and place sales 12th overall.
Mitoe Taira tours and lectures across Japan answering upper management and leadership questions about business management and about the book, and the Mitoe Taira Process of forging.
‘Surfaced as forged’ steel (black surface steel) as a finished product, a high production technology, rare in the industry
Using the Mitoe Taira Process the material yield rate* is extremely high, resulting in far less raw material usage.
Final product: 100 kg / 120 kg
(*The final product weight / materials used)
Final product 100 kg / 180 kg
(*The final product weight / materials used)
*This is the ratio of the output quantity to the raw materials and ingredients used in production. First pass yield (FPY), also known as throughput yield (TPY). With the current cost of raw materials skyrocketing, less loss is an absolute necessity to keeping the product and end products affordable.
The more precise output that we get from this process means a SIGNIFICANT savings in time / man hours spent on the finishing processes. Over 90% of the entire process can be automated.
Achieves non-stop, rapid production by eliminating bottlenecks on the production line.
The non-stop production with no bottlenecks and the high quality of finish means profits are high, cashflow is good, and you can achieve debt-free management of your business.
Knowledge of forging machines and dies to get your enterprise as close to ‘surfaced as forged’ (black surface forging) output as possible.
Machine / mold maintenance methodologies
Analysis of production bottlenecks, how to best address these to achieve maximum efficiency / profits
Training on how to best educate shift production line members internally or in Chinese forges
How to make wise and aggressive capital investments.
How to prepare for daily production.
Methods for saving labor, saving energy, and saving time
In a down economy, balancing keeping skilled labor, a lean labor force, and meeting production demands without paying overtime can be brutally difficult. But by training the existing staff in multiple skill sets, the workforce could be shifted fluidly between tasks as needed by production demands resulting in 3 times the production output without making extra hires or paying overtime wages.
Turn single skill workers into multi-skilled workers to eliminate the load on the production line by utilizing focused staff training.
Shortly after the Lehman Shock (as the American Sub-prime scandal and subsequent world recession of 2008 is called in Japan.)
In the 2000s, Taira Tanzo Inc. was going under because it hadn’t kept up with the times and couldn’t produce the volume and quality of output at the price the market was demanding. In need of a cash influx, they went to financial institutions looking for a bail-out but were rejected as having "zero value" and deemed unworthy of loans. With zero customers and no financial backing, Mitoe Taira took over the troubled company with a forge full of people relying on their salaries to support their families in July 2009 and rebooted both Taira Tanzo Inc., and the entire forging industry as well.
In addition to improving work efficiency by thoroughly reducing raw material waste, by introducing automation and bringing it to a 90% automation rate, using original analysis and know-how and ultimately achieving high quality stable processing speeds by training single task personnel and turning them into high functioning multi-skilled workers, she increased output by 3 times the volume without and extra hires or paying overtime.
Her innovations brought about industry record finishing times transforming Taira Tanzo Inc. into a company that delivered forged products to customers around the world, and thus achieving debt-free operations.
As part of her “out-of-the-box” approach to repurposing existing assets, Taira then installed solar panels on the unused land around the forge. With an investment of 2.4 billion yen, Mitoe Taira’s Taira Tanzo Inc. realized a 300 million yen per year profit from the solar power generation.
Tenacious and trustworthy, Mitoe Taira believes in keeping her word.
Business takes money, talent, and trust and because of her policy of always keeping her word, she’s even highly respected and deeply trusted by the China-based forges she worked and has ties with now.
Speaking of China, Mitoe Taira is one of a small handful of industry professionals who has earned the trust and respect of high-level Chinese forging enterprises and has been able to set up and innovate the process lines there for enterprises moving production to China with a 100% success rate. She's put in the time, and has the respect of the connections she's build up while being a forge expert.
She also believes actions speak louder than words, and that earning money is more than just becoming rich, but about how you can help others with the money you’ve earned.
In the 10 years following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, she donated over 120 million Yen ($1 million USD), and donates over 2 million yen annually to the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) . Upon selling Taira Tanzo Inc., Mitoe Taira donated 100 million yen to Hakui City for an educational fund.
Extremely moved by the Tohoku earthquake, Mitoe learned there were close to 800 orphans and injured left from the tragic catastrophe. Moved by the sheer scale of this unprecedented tragedy, Mitoe contacted Tohoku University and funded a psychological aftercare program with the university to help the orphaned children whose lives were destroyed by the earthquake and subsequent disasters.
At this very time, the global recession, a too strong and uncompetitive yen, and global demand was down, and she was still digging Taira Tanzo Inc. out of the precarious situation her predecessor had left the company in, and extra funds were tight.
But her personal commitment to the victims of the catastrophic event and knowing that even with the business issues they were facing, how much better of she was than the people who really needed help, and she never wavered from her commitment to people whose entire lives and livelihoods had been so tragically stolen.
