Skilled Trades Association, CAW Local 199 St. Catharines (General Motors Unit) | ||||||
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In the boardroom at the General Motors Oshawa plant is a baseball bat. Two words are carved on it: Beat Toyota The assembly facility in Ontario stands out among GM's North American plants. GRANT ROBERTSON takes a look Thursday, September 15, 2005 Page B16 Darcy Ste. Marie hasn't reinvented the wheel. But he can take a little credit for changing the way they are made. About a year ago, the man in charge of tire assembly at General Motors Ltd.'s auto assembly facility in Oshawa, Ont., noticed a problem on the production line. The flow of parts, the lifeblood of every manufacturing operation, was off kilter. When cars passed by on the line to be fitted with new tires and rims, the wheels required for the various models being built weren't always ready. The disruptions left crews scrambling to make up for lost time. "I've got 45 seconds to build five tires for each car," Mr. Ste. Marie says over the steady noise of the plant. "That's not a lot if something goes wrong. And you don't want to stop the line." The solution was a simple fix: better communication between the line and the wheel crews. In the end, it probably shaved a few seconds from the time it takes to make a car. But in the modern auto sector, where a new car rolls off the line in Oshawa every 45 seconds like clockwork, even the smallest efforts can be counted as major victories. A century after Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, revolutions in auto manufacturing are rare. It's the honing of the process that companies now chase. "We're not landing a man on the moon any more," says Mike Quinton, the plant manager in Oshawa, Canada's largest auto assembly facility producing more than 2,600 cars a day. "Eliminating the need to walk around to get parts, eliminating wasted movements, having the parts right there when you need them: It all adds up." Despite growing cost pressures at GM's head office in Detroit, from slumping car sales to mounting pensions and U.S. health-care bills, the Oshawa facility stands out among the auto giant's North American network. It has topped two key industry rankings in the past year: Harbour Consulting, which tracks the time it takes for plants to produce a single vehicle, ranked GM's Oshawa No. 1 operation, which manufactures Chevrolet Impalas and Monte Carlos, at the top of its 2005 list. J. D. Power, which keeps tabs on consumer complaints and defects, placed the Oshawa No. 2 plant, which makes the Buick LaCrosse/Allure and Pontiac Grand Prix, highest in a study of vehicle quality. Though the company has fared well in such rankings in recent years, the fact that GM's Canadian manufacturing headed up both lists in 2005 has drawn attention. "Some of the most productive plants are in Canada," says Dennis DesRosiers, an industry analyst at DesRosiers Automotive Consultants in Richmond Hill, Ont. Mr. Quinton, a transplanted American who has run plants throughout North America, is bothered that most people think only of Honda, Toyota, Nissan or Mazda when they think of manufacturing prowess. "Does it get in your craw that there's still so much talk about the Japanese? Yeah," he says. "But we can't control that. All we can do is make cars." Mr. Quinton might be the only auto plant manager in Canada that keeps a baseball bat in the boardroom. He reaches for the bat whenever he needs to make a point about the company's priorities. Carved into the barrel are two simple words: Beat Toyota. "That's what we're trying to do," he says. But there is little breathing room in the manufacturing race, particularly against Toyota, which is renowned for its consistency and dominance. The margins between auto makers, and their plants, has shrunk in recent years to the point that that GM could just as easily drop a few notches in next year's productivity rankings without doing anything different. According to the Harbour Report, GM's Oshawa No. 1 plant builds Impalas and Monte Carlos in 15.85 hours. North America's second most productive plant, a Nissan operation in Tennessee, requires 15 minutes more to assemble an Altima. Emphasizing how close the field is, Ford's Atlanta facility placed third at 16.58 hours per vehicle, while Oshawa No. 2 was fourth at 17.47 hours. In all, fewer than four hours separate the time it takes for North America's top 10 plants to produce everything from sedans to SUVs. "The difference in productivity between the worst plant and the best plant is not that great, all things considered," Mr. DesRosiers says. "Success or failure tends to be more whether the company has a winning model rather than manufacturing proficiency." Nowhere is that picture more evident than in Canada's auto manufacturing sector. On one hand, Toyota's Cambridge, Ont., plant is running full-out building its popular Corolla and Matrix models, while Ford's plant in Oakville, Ont. has been stalled at half-capacity because the Freestar minivan hasn't been selling. And while North American auto makers slash sticker prices with employee-pricing incentives, Honda Canada Inc. set a monthly sales record in August, instead using slightly lower interest rates to move 9,200 Civics from its 2005 stock. Those are numbers Detroit-based manufacturers covet. As far as the Big Three are concerned, only DaimlerChrysler has fought back the trend of slumping North American sales with the debut of the Chrysler 300, which has kept its Brampton, Ont., plant active. With the Dodge Magnum and revamped Charger -- two cars the company has big hopes for -- also assembled there, the Brampton site is expected to remain busy for the foreseeable future. The gap between productivity at Canadian plants and the profitability of the parent auto makers was seized upon by the Canadian Auto Workers this fall as it geared up for contract negotiations with the Big Three. "To be profitable, you have to produce cars that people want to buy and pay a good price for," CAW economist Jim Stanford says. "Canada's auto industry is more productive than the U.S. . . . There are issues of design and innovation. Unfortunately we have no control over those pieces of the puzzle." Inside the cavernous Oshawa facility, Mr. Quinton concerns himself chiefly with the plant's production numbers. He doesn't mention the soaring U.S. health-care costs that are hampering GM and Ford and have driven GM's production costs up $1,600 (U.S.) per vehicle. Those expenses, coupled with a high pension burden, have plunged GM's average profit per vehicle into the red, with the company losing $2,300 (U.S) on every vehicle it sold in the first quarter of 2005, according to Harbour. Instead, Mr. Quinton monitors production time and car counts. While efficiency at the Oshawa plant alone won't solve GM's predicament, allowing the facility to slip would only send costs higher and compound the problem. At a spot on the Oshawa line where the shell of a car is fitted with its engine, the task takes less than 90 seconds, but it's undergone decades of tweaking. Years ago, workers would have moved the engine into place themselves, then bolted it in by hand. Now, crews employ hydraulic hoists and robotic arms to install the guts of a car in less time than it takes to adjust the mirrors before driving. "We measure everything here," Mr. Quinton explains. "We measure it every hour, every day, every month and for the year." Looming overhead throughout the plant are large digital scoreboards, keeping tabs on how many cars are being produced, the number of vehicles that will be made by the end of the day and what percentage are found with defects that need correcting (usually between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent). Every few minutes the numbers update themselves and Mr. Quinton's eyes instinctively dart to the ceiling. For those times when the boards are not in view, the production data is beamed directly to his cell phone. As a veteran of the sector, Mr. Quinton knows efficiency improvements are always around the corner. The Oshawa plant is a testament to that notion. When it began operating in the 1950s, the plant would build half the car on one floor then ship the body on elevators to another level to be assembled further. Today, such a waste of time and energy on the line is laughable. But like any good innovation, the idea seems obvious only after it has been conceived. Tweaking the way GM managed its tire assembly or reducing the amount of inventory sitting idle at the plant are lessons the company has figured out over time. Sometimes the learning has come the hard way, as Japanese auto makers regularly surpassed their North American competitors in efficiency benchmarks during the 1980s and 1990s. "It's been a long time coming," Mr. Quinton says of the plant's evolution. "A decade ago, you would see parts scattered all over and workers would have to walk up and down the line to get bolts. We don't do that any more." | ||||||
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