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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (259835)	11/13/2005 6:09:37 PM
From: steve harris	Respond to of 1578271

Try this... Saturn always use to be 1,2, or 3 in customer satisfaction since it's inception. They even use to brag that their local union agreement was on a card that employees could carry in their shirt pocket. Last year, Saturn fell out of the top 10. And their union is bragging about their new contract they won before the quality tanked... labornotes.org Last year was a very good year for the 7,200 workers, members of UAW Local 1853, at Saturn's Spring Hill, Tennessee manufacturing complex. A string of victories was capped by the late December ratification of a new contract. This contract closely mirrors the master agreement in place at every other General Motors facility. Before, GM's Saturn plant was the poster child for labor-management cooperation, or team concept, in place of negotiated rights. Our educational system has the same problem. Unions instead of performance rewards...

To: tejek who wrote (259835)	11/13/2005 11:02:27 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1578271

"You need only to look at the 11.6 million vehicle recalls in 2004 to fully understand that their recalls were driven by "all new" products that were not totally engineered and tested before they hit the street." And that is mainly because they cannot adopt any of Deming's rules for quality. Quality needs to be designed in from the beginning and it requires the whole company to work on it. You can't just produce a product and then test for quality at the end, that leads to high rates of rejection. But to follow Deming, you have to empower workers and reduce managers to facilitators for those who actually do the work. And GM management can't accept that. Japan accepts it better and it works for them. Not that Japanese companies perfectly implement Deming's rules, but they are a whole lot better than US car companies. Quality is something the whole company does. And there needs to be constant feedback from everyone in the company. You can't have walls in the company where management hands down decrees and marketing throws ideas over the wall to engineering and engineering throws designs over the wall to manufacturing and manufacturing throws products over the wall to maintenance. Representatives from all areas need to be involved in all stages of product development. And GM is the poster child for avoiding this.