By: Jack Terrill

Greetings from NAETC,

Recently, we lost the L234 Fenders. The leadership outside the plant made the decision that we were way late and over budget. Both of those points that caused the work to be pulled are true; however, there are multiple reasons on why this happened, and they could be debated for days. The bottom line is that the corporation lost faith in our ability to deliver dies on time to the launch date and pulled the work.

Naturally, with the T1 Fenders being the bulk of the work left in the plant, there was a huddle-up on the salary side and the decision was made to go back to delivering quality dies on time.

This is not the first time we’ve been down this path. Back with Kurt Wiese was the VP for Manufactured Engineering that is what he was pushing us to do; hit the quality and timing, and the cost will eventually fall into place.

If we ship quality dies on time and meet the launch dates, our detractors will not have near the argument, rather than if we’re missing on all three buckets.

So, what is the plan moving forward? I believe we’ll see a concerted effort from the salaried team to ship quality tools and dies on time, to eliminate the heat from the organization that they’ve been receiving.

The issue here is that management’s plan will be to ship our work out before we ever have chance to do it. They will take the stance that we’re utilized, so they’ll just ship it out. I’ll elaborate more next month.