Popularity: 1
Vote:   | A lot of other things come along with Chapter 11, which basically end up in a lot of pain. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | A lot of times, people will get down on the situation with the unions and with the UAW. But this wouldn't have worked without good engagement at the local level with the UAW. They understand that improving quality and productivity is important for their long-term success as well. It's been a real team sport. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | All this improvement is great, but all that does is get us in the game to play for improvements that we need in the future, so that we can be aggressive in the marketplace. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | For many years, we didn't have one person in charge of manufacturing. We had seven or eight operating units with seven or eight heads of manufacturing, where some ideas were the same, but a lot of stuff was done very differently between Car and Truck, between Saturn and Lansing. In terms of efficiency as measured by Harbour, we were just doggy. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Ford, as I understand it, had done away with the concept of regional management, and now they've re-introduced that in Europe, so it's kind of a two-way street. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | History shows you don't know what the future brings. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I remember very clearly at the first budget review having a pretty direct conversation with the head of manufacturing... We began to get huge improvements in productivity and responsiveness. I got a chance to see that firsthand. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I think we'll probably pass Toyota in the U.S. on the workers-per-vehicle metric. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I'm like Sergeant Schultz, I know nothing. We are trying to share ideas around the world. We don't just come up with a great idea in Brazil and ignore it in the rest of the world. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I'm not sure we think it's a win to talk about what you're taking out. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | If you look from 1992 to 1997, we've really reduced the number of car models from more than 100 to about 81. Our strategy is to have the right number of products. Segment the brands better. There's a lot of work being done on the distribution side of the business. And the data's showing that our new products are doing a very decent job in the market. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | The big and the fast beat the small and the fast. If you check out the NBA today, they're big and fast. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There was an almost an 80% decline one year from 640,000 vehicles to 200,000, and now it's grown back. Our share has grown a lot. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | There's been a consistency of approach and a consistency of execution. Moving to a common system and common metrics has really helped us. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | This is a game that's going to play as long as you're playing it. It's never going to end. It'll go until I retire, and when the next person has the job, they'll be on it too. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We don't always agree on stuff, but when it's time to blow the whistle and start the game, we're not still debating. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | We don't build the pickup in Mexico now. You can get a funny picture if you just look at Suburbans and say, holy cow, they're shipping all of those back to the U.S. Yeah, but part of the deal was that we would ship the pickups from, primarily, Fort Wayne. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | We no longer take it for granted that we can't be the most productive manufacturer. That's the way it used to be in the 1950s and l960s. We need to get back to that, as one element of a strong position in this excess capacity world that we're going to be in. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | We've been able to use NAFTA. We import a lot more products to fill niches. We don't have to assemble them locally. We've consolidated a lot around pickup trucks. Rather than build everything to sell in Mexico, you can ship finished products back and forth. You get the production efficiencies of scale. |