Manufacturing Missionary

Automotive Industries, Nov, 2000 by Lindsay Brooke

When Ron Harbour and his team visit your plant, they're on a crusade to help it improve. Are you ready for the tour?

Judging from the preparations being made, you'd think the President or the Pope -- or at least CEO Jack Smith -- is about to pay a visit to the General Motors Corp. assembly plant this autumn morning in Ohio.

The meeting room is packed with people. At one table, the plant manager is reviewing the latest production numbers on his PowerPoint screen one last time. Across the room, the UAW local steward's making sure he's got the quality data memorized. Two or three hourly guys carrying video cameras jockey for floor space as carts loaded with coffee and gooey pastries are wheeled in. A box of safety glasses stands ready for the extensive shop floor tour later on.

There's electricity in the air, but it's a much higher voltage than any GM "suit" could generate. Everybody's pumped because Harbour and Associates is coming to call.

A few years ago, the same visit by the auto industry's best-known manufacturing analyst and his fact finding team would have had this plant circling the wagons. Back then, its productivity was not competitive. Quality was iffy. The word "efficiency" was viewed with suspicion by the rank and file. And the annual Harbour Report, which lays bare the performance of North America's auto factories, was hardly this facility's favorite read.

But the upbeat banter today means everybody is actually looking forward to their visitor. The plant's in the midst of a turnaround. And some of the credit goes indirectly to the Harbour organization and the role its widely respected report plays in stoking the industry's competitive fires.

"No other industry has a publication that's as dominant as the Harbour Report ," observes Sean McAlinden, manager of economic studies at the University of Michigan's Center for Automotive Research. "We use it in every study we do throughout our office. It's quality data, and they keep improving it year to year"

Company president Ron Harbour and his team gain their insight about auto manufacturing operations the hard way -- by seeing them first-hand. Their 50 to 60 plant tours in North America and Europe each year are the ultimate window into what really goes into producing new cars and trucks -- how improvements are made, and how those improvements pay off.

"At every facility, we meet with the plant management and union leaders and talk to the people on the floor," explains Harbour "It's become a big event for them. We're there to find out whether there's substance behind the progress -- to learn what drives the numbers." He adds that his company's mission isn't to divulge secrets. Instead, it's to truly understand the total vehicle-making picture -- body shop, trim/chassis/final assembly, stamping and powertrain -- and to share what's learned with the industry, so it can improve as a whole.

The scope of Harbour's work is one reason his company has no real competitors. The business has two halves -- a management consultancy, and a group that produces the Harbour Report-North America and Harbour Report-Europe, which remains a private study by agreement with the OEMs. There's talk of adding a South American version.

The Manufacturing Advantage

Harbour, 43, admits to taking pride in "sort of having the proverbial finger in the industry's back" -- a perspective he inherited from his outspoken father, company founder Jim Harbour (see sidebar page 33). Both assert that manufacturers must keep getting better for the benefit of their customers, shareholders and employees.

Those that have improved the most are the ones that really haven't focused on productivity, notes Harbour "Instead, they're realizing that if they really fix the upstream part of the problem - designing for manufacturability engineering their processes for minimal downtime and waste - they'll have a much greater chance at being successful on the plant end. It's the upstream stuff that determines 70 to 80 percent of your productivity cost and quality"

With so much work being done upstream, is manufacturing still a differentiator among OEMs? It depends on the company, notes Harbour

"The Big Three in this country have completely lost manufacturing as a competitive advantage," he says. "I can't name a specific process technology that GM, Ford or Chrysler have chosen to keep in-house that truly separates them from the competition. They've out-sourced their process and tooling technology; I call it the 'generic approach to manufacturing.' But others -- Honda and Toyota, for example -- believe manufacturing definitely gives them an edge."

He cites Honda's patented process for molding instrument paneis, which is done at the automaker's assembly plants. "Honda feeis that if it out-sources its IPs to a supplier, then it loses a unique product technology," he says. "One reason Honda customers buy Hondas is for the richness and quality of their cockpits. That advantage is lost if a supplier is using the same process to make roughly the same IP for another company. So it's not always a sourcing issue; keeping manufacturing technology in-house is an advantage in the market."