| In
search of perfection
General Motors wants
zero rejection of its parts
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launched
by
Robert Burke
Virginia Business
November
2004
The
sun is barely up on a late September morning as the
first shift arrives, a steady flow of mostly GM-made
pickups and sedans rolling into the parking lot of GM
Powertrain’s sprawling building just south of
Fredericksburg. The plant sits between a Civil War battlefield
and the golf course of a private country club, but with
its groomed landscaping and green lawn it manages to
not look out of place.
But inside the building it is all metal and concrete,
and the clank and hum of machines. Employees make torque
converter clutches here, the devices in automatic transmissions
that help transfer power from the engine to the axles.
The 275,000-square-foot plant makes about 21,000 clutches
a day, working three shifts and shipping the parts to
assembly plants in places like Flint, Mich., where they
go into Chevrolet’s Silverado pickups and the
GMC Sierra pickups. On the plant floor are a few shiny
new GM cars and trucks, so employees can see that they
working on something more than clutches. “We think
it helps with the pride by actually showing them our
products,” says plant manager David Clarkson.
The focus — a near-obsession, really — is
on coming as close to perfect as possible in every stage
of production. “It is extremely intense,”
says Paul Schrock, 31, the plant’s manufacturing
general supervisor. “To manufacturing, time lost
is something that’s never regained. If something
goes down, we want to be on it, we want to get on it.”
And the plant’s 270 workers have come awfully
close to perfect at times. Between September last year
and this past May the plant lowered the number of parts
rejected by its customers to about 1 part per million
— a remarkable achievement that was only interrupted
when a shipment of parts was misnumbered.
The process begins with 6,000-pound rolls of steel,
which feed five giant fabrication presses stamping out
parts for the platter-shaped converter clutches. At
U-shaped work stations, operators handle several steps
of assembling the clutches and work with machines that
can detect errors automatically. Containers of parts
are carefully tracked and numbered, and there’s
a lot of attention paid to the placement and location
of everything. At one machine, footprints painted on
the floor show where users should stand. “A clean
workplace with all the visuals in place makes for a
safer workplace and a higher quality product,”
Clarkson says.
In fact, the operators play a key role in developing
the procedures the plant uses, Clarkson says. In the
middle of the production floor is a glass-walled meeting
room where operators and other employees meet. One wall
is papered with charts and graphics — progress
reports that measure nearly every detail of plant operations,
such as inventory, plant safety, energy conservation
and whether the parts are shipped on time. “How
the plant is performing is not something just management
deals with,” Clarkson says. “We get everyone
involved.”
That often happens at meetings of a handful of employees
who are pulled off their regular jobs to spend a few
weeks talking about procedures. Schrock says the plant
gets an edge by drawing on workers’ ideas. “When
we engage the folks at the line level, we are able to
enhance our overall business performance. They’re
able to help us improve.”
About half the plant’s employees are from the
local work force and the rest are transfers from other
GM facilities. Schrock, for example, came from the GM
Powertrain facility in Bay City, Mich., two years ago.
The transfer of experienced hands is critical —
in recent months Schrock and others have focused on
making a new kind of clutch that will go in models in
the Cadillac line and some new models that GM will reveal
soon. It’s a painstaking test of evaluating how
well the Spotsylvania plant can make and deliver the
part.
The Spotsylvania County plant is one of 22 GM Powertrain
plants in the U.S., and the only one in Virginia. GM
acquired the plant 25 years ago, choosing this site
in part because of its East Coast location. The county
was mostly rural in 1979 but today is one of the state’s
fastest-growing localities, with a more diverse economy.
The mid-Atlantic location that attracted GM here has
aided the state’s automotive manufacturing sector.
Today that sector employs more than 25,000 people at
scores of factory sites around the state, according
to the Virginia Department of Economic Development.
Though Spotsylvania has grown dramatically since GM
arrived, the company still prizes the plant. Gary Partridge,
the county’s economic development director, helped
organize a 25th anniversary event last spring that included
a visit from GM’s Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner.
GM is one of the county’s biggest employers, Partridge
says. “I can’t say enough about the passion
I have for that plant to be here.”
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