GM'S FALLING MOTORS

It was 1979, during the long-lingering oil crises of that decade. The manufacturing managers of Pontiac's Plant 9 came under severe pressure to turn out increasing quantities of the energy efficient L-4 engines used by Pontiac, Chevrolet and supplied to American Motors. Consultants were brought aboard to help speed up production.

In their analysis of Plant 9, the consultants were shocked at what they found. They were even more stunned by management's reaction to their findings.

The engine blocks coming over from the GM foundry were sloppily made, having too little metal around the machine holes. Both the drill press operator and the consultants saw drill bits bowing out instead of moving down in a straight line. This resulted in rapid drill bit wear, broken drill bits and excess drill press downtime.

"If those guys don't fix this pretty soon, the engines are going to start falling out of cars on the assembly line," yelled the drill press operator.

The consultants took this to "Big Tom," the manufacturing manager, four times. The confrontations resulted in strange reactions. The bottom lines:

Meeting 1. "Aww, you can't trust those UAW guys."

Meeting 2. "I haven't got time to go into the plant and stare at a machine."

Meeting 3. "I talked to my superintendent and he said there was no problem."

Meeting 4. "Look, every time we go to war with the foundry, we lose. So we stopped butting heads with them a long time ago."

Two months later, a very flush-faced "Big Tom" run up to his consultant, shouting, "Joe! Joe! Did you hear what happened? Our engines started falling out of their cars on the assembly line. The Assembly Division is raising hell!"

He imparted this information as if the consultant had never told him about the problem two months earlier. In GM culturespeak, he was signaling the consultants to keep quiet about the whole incident.

Everyone at Plant 9 could recite the phrase, "You can't make a good engine out of a bad block." Yet all the blocks from the foundry were bad and nobody did a thing.

During the same week, a consultant watched a major gating area, the revolving circular platform where finished engines were started and tested before moving by conveyer out to the shipping area. Discovering something odd, the consultant went up to the foreman and asked him to stop the process. Then consultant and foreman mounted the platform and inspected the engines, finding that one engine had been traveling around the rotating platform continuously, its malfunctioning conveyer mechanism failing to send the engine off to shipping.

Checking the serial numbers, the consultant found that the engine had been tested over twelve thousand times. Which made it the first engine in the history of the auto industry needing an oil change before it left the plant.

Although this discovery and subsequent correction improved engine through-put by nine percent, "Big Bill" and his subordinates denied it had ever happened.

During the second week, an industrial engineer approached a consultant with a very strange challenge: "I'll bet you ten dollars that if I paint an engine block bright red, you won't be able to follow it through the plant and find it at the other end."

The consultant bit, and lost what turned out to be a sucker bet. Because there were so many machine breakdowns throughout the line, the superintendent maintained huge banks of partially finished engines along the entire line. As an engine moved down the line, it would be shunted off the line and banked several times before completing its journey. A comparable four-cylinder engine line at Toyota had no banks at all. Thus the Plant 9 engine took forever to move through the plant.

A senior vice president warned the GM Chairman and his executive committee of the situation. He said it required seven man-hours to produce an engine at Plant 9, but only one man-hour to produce a comparable engine at Toyota.

The offending senior vice president lasted two months before he was retired.

Worker wisdom: "Roger don't want to hear any bad news."

One day, a machine started spewing oil. The foreman called maintenance. A mechanic showed up, looked briefly at the malfunctioning machine and said, "No I won't fix that. That's Sunday work." And he left, preferring to fix the machine on double-time instead of regular time. The foreman could do nothing but slow down the line and attempt "Band-Aid" approaches. He didn't fight with maintenance because the UAW reigned supreme.

One day "Big Bill" was criticized by his management for "running a dirty plant." The next day, a hundred day laborers showed up to clean the place. Unfortunately, "Big Bill" neglected to order brooms. Everybody milled about for half a day while the foreman dashed about town looking for brooms.

The consultants found many more things wrong with plant operations and in the management styles of managers, superintendents and foremen. The consultants reached two conclusions:

You can't build a good engine out of a bad block.

You can't build a good engine out of a bad management.

There was a big sign hanging from the ceiling. It proclaimed, "The best damn engine plant in the world."

A worker leaving at the end of his shift was heard to say, "If we are the best, God help the rest."

What he had no way of knowing was that Pontiac's problems were merely a microcosm of the whole of General Motors.

Events of the past quarter century prove you can't build a good company out of a bad management.