Renaissance man: Gary Cowger has dedicated his career to restoring General Motors to its former glory - Automotive Industries' 2004 Executive Of The Year: Gary L. Cowger President General Motors North America - Cover Story

Automotive Industries, Feb, 2004 by John Peter

Gary Cowger got his first taste of automobile manufacturing as an 18-year old General Motors Institute (GMI) co-op student, working at the Buick-Oldsmobile-Pontiac assembly plant in his hometown of Kansas City, Kan.

"I was hanging doors and bolting seats when I started," Cowger says.

"I'll tell you one of the things that was interesting to me," he continues, "is that when you bolted seats, you knew when you got off and you stripped a bolt."

Cowger says that being young, naive and anxious to please, when he'd stripped a bolt he would write out a repair ticket.

"Well, I got my butt chewed out for doing somebody else's job," Cowger says.

The supervisor told him that there was an inspector stationed down the line whose job it was to check the bolts.

Cowger smiles and says, "I had never seen him reach in there and check a bolt."

He can now look back on that incident as the one that helped form his opinions about what needed to be done to change the company's focus on manufacturing.

Cowger agrees that starting his career on the assembly line has proved to be an asset.

"I always thought it was really good," Cowger says. "It makes you understand what people out there are going through and what the issues are."

While the industry's leaders always fall into either the 'bean counter' or 'car guy' column, Cowger has made his mark as a manufacturing guy.'

He honed his manufacturing skills at the Kansas City plant, rising from the shop floor to plant superintendent. It was also his expertise in manufacturing that would fuel his rise to GM's executive suites (some promotions coming in less than a year).

Armed with a Bachelors Degree in industrial engineering from GMI and a Masters of Science degree from MIT, he left Kansas City in 1979 for the general superintendent's job at the Lansing, Mich., assembly plant, part of the Oldsmobile division.

Only 18 months later he took the job of production manager at the GM Assembly Division (GMAD) in St. Louis, Mo. He was appointed plant manager of GMAD's Wentzville, Mo., assembly plant in 1982 where he was responsible for the building, staffing and start-up of the new assembly plant. From there he became the complex manager of the Lordstown, Ohio, assembly and stamping facilities.

In 1987, he was named manufacturing manager of the Cadillac Motor Division where he was instrumental in helping Cadillac grab the coveted Malcolm Baldrige Award for Quality. In 1990, he became executive director of advanced manufacturing engineering for the Advanced Engineering Staff at the GM Technical Center in Warren, Mich.

Three years later he was appointed executive-in-charge of the North American Operations (NAO) Manufacturing Center and then named president and managing director of General Motors de Mexico the following year where he became somewhat of a folk hero to the locals, being the first GM executive to learn their language.

"I thought it was important to learn the language," says Cowger. "I was trying to do the same thing at Opel, except German was a lot harder to learn than Spanish."

He took on the job of VP of European manufacturing for GM in January of 1998 and became group VP of labor relations in November of that year. In January of 2001, he was named group VP in charge of manufacturing and labor relations and took on his current responsibilities as president of GM North America in November of that year.

It was just before Cowger left for Mexico, while still in charge of NAO, that then GM Chairman Jack Smith asked him to begin a program that would centralize the manufacturing groups.

That program, and the lessons learned from the Toyota NUMMI joint venture laid the foundation for what would become GM's Global Manufacturing System (GMS). While the early stages of the program showed positive results, Cowger says that GMS didn't realize its true potential until later in 2001.

The GM Global Manufacturing System has its roots in the Toyota Manufacturing System, but has been customized to fit GM. It standardizes manufacturing processes in every GM facility around the world but, most importantly, GMS is built around people and the philosophy that everyone, in every position, has something to offer.

Layouts and processes are designed around providing support for the operators and teams on the plant floor. GMS cuts out waste, with the end result being a better quality product built in much less time.

Cowger credits GMS with the company's quality comeback. But GM can also give Cowger credit for having an innate ability to sell the concept to a company that resisted change, often pitting management against union to the detriment of both.

He praised the union's involvement in the resurrection of GM in his speech to the attendees of the 2003 Traverse City Management Briefings.

"It's amazing what happens when you give people the respect and support they deserve," Cowger said. "We saw attitudes change from 'can't do' to 'can do' ... and then to ... 'We can do even better than that."

GMS is showing measurable results. In the last several years assembly and powertrain plants consistently rank high in both J.D. Power surveys and The Harbour Report, and GM products are doing the same, taking number one spots in the J.D. Power initial quality surveys and finding their way onto Consumer Report's recommended buy lists.