Page 30 - MetalForming February 2010

Michael Bleau has served manufacturing and consumer- related industries since 1986. Prior to forming Industry Scope, a strategic b2b and b2c sales and marketing consultancy, in 2002, he held executive positions for several automation and press manufacturers. Michael regularly consults with manufacturing companies on strategic planning, sales and marketing, brand and product development, PR and sales-channel development. Industry Scope
tel. 810/397-1429
mbleau@industry-scope.com www.industry-scope.com
With the recent publishing of “Multi-Company Project Manage- ment: Maximizing Business Results through Strategic Collaboration” came the opportunity to talk again with an old acquaintance, author Dean Baker. Dean enjoyed a long, successful 40-yr. run at General Motors and retired in 2005 largely to spend time teaching and consulting. Even in retirement, Dean remains very involved within the stamp- ing community, and chances are you may know him. You may recall a series of projects during his tenure when Gen- eral Motors invested more than $2-bil- lion in stamping plant modernization. The program was implemented over 14 years, involved 16 major capital equipment suppliers spanning four con- tinents, and impacted more than 60 percent of all of GM’s stamping equip- ment in North America.
This started in 1994 when Dean moved from his post at GM’s Parma, OH stamping plant to its headquarters in Warren at a time when GM manage- ment was beginning the formation of a new stamping operation. This was another in a series of major reorgani- zation moves including plant closures and consolidations that started in the early 1980s with an aim to improve GM competitiveness. The objective of the new division was to create and implement corporate manufacturing standards and operating procedures for stamping that would allow GM to bet- ter leverage its size and resources. Until then, each mostly autonomous plant maintained individual facility-specific requirements for equipment. Each had specifications for pneumatic compo- nents, controls, hydraulics, motors, drives, paint color codes, pipe-and-wire
standards, automation, press die clamps, the works.
At that time, the receiving plants’ demands eliminated many of the advan- tages of shared standards, which jeop- ardized GM’s ability to implement improvements and maintain flexibility among the plants. Compounding these challenges, GM was a behemoth, oper- ating some 14 stamping plants in North America, selling nearly 5 million vehi- cles annually in the U.S. and reliant upon a large equipment supply base, each with their own set of unique stan- dards. Deciding what would be the new order and the implementation of new corporate-wide standards, along with integrating these with existing equip- ment, had to be tight or vehicle launch- es were at risk.
As if this wasn’t enough, it came in the wake of the 1992 departure of GM’s infamous and highly adversarial pur- chasing czar Ignacio Lopez. Lopez left many suppliers gun shy of GM’s coop- eration efforts, to say the least. For Dean’s team to succeed he needed sup- plier collaboration on a whole new scale.
Impressive Results
The result over several years of fine- tuning is what Dean today refers to as multi-company project management (MPM). MPM is a hybrid and integra- tion of two methodologies: multi-com- pany management and project man- agement. The result is a collection of activities or best practices organized into six process groups; cooperate, communicate, coordinate, control, complete and close. To accomplish the desired results, the project manager exercises freedom in selecting the
28 METALFORMING / FEBRUARY 2010
www.metalformingmagazine.com
THE BUSINESS OF METALFORMING MICHAEL BLEAU
Multi-Company Project Management: A Case for Collaboration