BRAMPTON, Ontario Captain Ahab had his great white whale. Denny Pawley has Chrysler Corp.'s LH doors.
Dennis Pawley is pushing, scolding, cajoling and cussing Chrysler toward being world-class in manufacturing. Chrysler's thickset and intensely focused executive vice president of manufacturing bears a primary responsibility in Chrysler's drive to achieve quality as high as the company's profits and stock price. That is, world class: quality as good as or better than Toyota's.
As Pawley pushes decision-making down to the plant floor and cuts layers of salaried supervisors, quality is growing and productivity improvements are contributing to record profits like the nearly $1 billion earned in the first quarter.
But the quality surveys and conventional wisdom put Chrysler's quality barely in the middle of the pack.
And then there are those LH doors. They're an obsession.
The doors are the last great legacy of the old Chrysler - the Chrysler that developed cars by department, not by platform teams; the Chrysler that designed cars that were hard to manufacture.
Assembly-line operators have figured out how to bend the door headers over a mallet to make them fit better. While that kind of fix is not uncommon in the U.S. auto industry, it doesn't belong in a world-class plant.
And Pawley insists on world-class plants.
Take his reaction to a graph that shows an improvement in the LH doors' warranty problems. That performance is superimposed over a basically flat target rate.
'That's not much of a goddamned target,' Pawley groused to the head of the Bramalea, Ontario, plant, which makes most of the hot-selling LH sedans and all of the stretched luxury versions.
In a scolding tone, he told Richard Entenmann, who has managed two other Chrysler plants in the United States and worked with Maserati in Italy: Make the target tougher. Entenmann readily agreed.
So it went on a full-day product/operations review that Pawley conducted at the Bramalea plant here earlier this month.
Pawley, 52 and a raw-boned physical presence, wore the uniform of the modern manufacturing guy - golf shirt and sweater - accented in his case by a gold chain and three rings. When he's in repose, his thick glasses can make him look a little distracted. But when he commands a meeting, his intensity demands full attention.
Pawley allowed two reporters to tag along on the review, asking only that they not print any proprietary numbers.
The trip provided a glimpse of a forceful and relentlessly unforgiving management style born on a General Motors plant floor and honed through stints at Mazda and United Technologies Corp. And it showed one man's approach to insisting on performance from the top down, while encouraging workers on the plant floor to manage the day-to-day work and solve problems from the bottom up.
Pawley moved easily from wrathful god to appreciative co-worker as he rooted out waste and demanded quality.
7: 20 a.m.
Pentastar Aviation terminal
Pontiac, Mich.
Pawley stands amid a couple dozen Chrysler executives, drinking coffee and waiting to board the company's airplanes. He's leading a dozen people to Bramalea.
Theodor Cunningham, executive vice president of sales and marketing and general manager of minivan operations, and Chris Theodore, general manager of minivan platform engineering, are waiting to head to St. Louis as they prepare a plant there for the all-new 1996 minivan that launches next winter.
The close relationship between product people and plant people is critical to developing vehicles that are easy to manufacture - and that avoid problems like the LH doors.
And Pawley sees another corporate improvement in the two destinations. At one time, he says, if another officer was going to a plant, 'I'd have gone with him to cover my ass.'
Aboard Chrysler's luxurious G2 jet, Pawley sits across from Frank Ewasyshyn, 42, his tall, baby-faced general manager of large and small platform assembly. They talk quality.
A new example: Chrysler will make sure all its Monroney stickers are pasted no more than 1.2 degrees off plumb. If the sticker is off-line, Pawley says, 'The customer will think the car's shitty too.' Ewasyshyn points out that Toyota has a new vinyl adhesive for its stickers, raising the science of Monroneys to a new level.
Toyota will rear its head again and again this day.
In February, Pawley visited Toyota and Honda plants in Japan. 'Toyota is still the benchmark,' he says. 'They manage their inventory and materials, and their quality is the best.' He understands Toyota's superiority, but it gravels him.
At the same time, he says, 'we've made big strides on Honda.'
COST ANALYST AT PONTIAC
Pawley began his career with a short stint as a cost analyst with Pontiac, then became a foreman. His peak at GM came when then-Pontiac boss William Hoglund selected him to manage the innovative Fiero plant in 1983. His language and much of his approach stem from his shop-floor experience.
He repeatedly says Chrysler is trying to change its 'manufacturing guys into professional business guys.' Rather than just laying off workers and shifting their pay to another department, Chrysler tries to use them in 'corrective action teams,' or CATs, which seek solutions to problems on the floor. That may make Chrysler's productivity look worse to analysts who just count cars and factory workers, he says. But it solves problems and generates profit.
He's proud that Chrysler manufacturing is down to 7,200 salaried employees, from 10,000 in 1991. That will translate into 470 vehicles per salaried manufacturing employee in 1994, double the 236 in 1991. Pawley points out that 85,000 of Chrysler's 115,000 employees report to him.
8: 30 a.m.
Floor of the Bramalea plant in Brampton, Ontario
The Bramalea plant, which opened in 1986, came to Chrysler with the 1987 purchase of American Motors Corp.
After Chrysler flushed the Eagle Premier and Dodge Monaco out of Bramalea, the plant got the critical LH sedans - the successful Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde and Eagle Vision that put Chrysler back in the hunt with mid-sized and upscale cars.
But Pawley is frustrated in his attempts to vault the cars into the top 10 in quality rankings by J.D. Power and Associates. In their first model year, the LH cars all ranked below the industry average in the Power Initial Quality Survey.
Mostly, he's frustrated by the doors.
The LH cars were the last Chrysler vehicles that were substantially developed before Chrysler was organized into platform teams. Pawley says they weren't in a platform team until 1991; LH production began in June 1992.
What does a platform team do for manufacturability? The LH doors are a welded collection of 11 critical stamped pieces of steel. The doors on Chrysler's JA sedans, which will begin production July 27 or 28 as the Dodge Stratus and Chrysler Cirrus, are made of a three critical stampings. And just months into production of the Neon, Chrysler numbers show the doors presenting almost negligible problems.
He's not blaming anybody for the LH doors. He just wants a systematic fix.
Surrounded by Ewasyshyn, Frank Ramacciato, Chrysler's finance director of manufacturing, plant manager Entenmann and the rest of his entourage, Pawley strides out onto the Bramalea floor. There he meets both hourly and salaried plant employees and a fence row of bulletin boards holding charts that detail problems and improvements.
It is not an amusing moment. Pawley wants to hear about the hole, not the doughnut. Tell him about the problems, not, as he says, 'how great we are.'
As he stands aggressively before the charts, arms folded and chomping his gum, he hears hourly workers tell how they're attacking the problem.
For now, workers are bending headers by hand, and finessing seals and gaskets that otherwise might cause wind noise. More importantly, some of those same hourly workers are also designing sophisticated machinery that will provide long-term, consistent solutions.
When workers explain the need for some changes in the door stampings, Pawley remarks, 'That could never have happened at Toyota.'
Pawley is sparing in his praise. When a worker explains one assembly fix that seems to be working, he sneers, 'That's a great job. It only took us 21/2 years to fix it.'
Teams at Bramalea focus on fixing the problems. Door teams. Paint teams. Decklid teams. But progress is often too slow for Pawley.
When Pawley asks Ewasyshyn about a decklid problem, Ewasyshyn shrugs as though he knows his answer is trouble: 'We've got some tough nuts to crack yet.'
Progress is better on the myriad of challenges that face every paint shop: Fibers and other foreign materials in the paint, drips and other imperfections. At the bulletin boards, paint-shop workers and in-plant representatives of the paint supplier, PPG Industries Inc., all in the same blue jumpsuits, document quality improvements on every front, and point to freshly manufactured cars to explain the improvements.
12: 45 p.m.
The plant tour
Entenmann drives Pawley in the lead golf cart as the entourage tours the plant. Pawley prides himself on experiencing the plant floor.
Unlike most manufacturing bosses, he is not an engineer. For most of his GM career, he was not a college graduate. In 1982, he earned a degree in personnel from Oakland University in suburban Detroit. While he admits his people know far more about their own jobs than he does, he says he can challenge them to do their jobs better.
At every stop, he asks how many re-work people there are, and what is being done to eliminate the need for them. On every line, he looks for line balance - that is, for jobs to be set up so that every worker is adding value every second, not merely moving to the job or waiting for the next job down the line. He presses again and again on FTC: 'first-time capability,' the ability to manufacture the vehicle properly at each stage so no inspection or re-work is needed. As Toyota has shown, inspection and rework don't add value.
WORKERS A KEY RESOURCE
In the body shop, Pawley points to a complicated-looking tool that is not yet operating. It will soon be bending door headers uniformly, reducing variability and cutting down on the cars' biggest flaw.
He proudly points to another tool that clamps onto the steel door to position it properly with the plastic front fender.
The tools were designed and built by the skilled tradesmen and line operators who work on the bodies.
'Skilled tradesmen used to give management the most trouble,' Pawley says. 'That's because they're smart, and we never let them think.' Now those once-troublesome employees solve the problems.
In the paint shop, members of a CAT demonstrate how they took 11/2 pounds of sealant out of the LH cars, while still improving quality. A team member named Jose Pareja shows how a simple piece of rope sealant neatly fills a joint that had required a very messy spraying. Pawley shakes Pareja's hand in congratulations.
This is an example of using labor that is not needed on the line to solve problems. If Chrysler had just laid off the extra workers, it would still pay them but the problems wouldn't be solved, Pawley says.
In the clean, new stamping plant filled with Komatsu presses, Pawley notes that five or six workers are inspecting and racking hoods from one press.
The excuse for the heavy inspection? It's a new press. 'That's all non-value-added shit,' Pawley says of the herd of workers. 'Next time I come back, I hope I see no more than three guys there.'
A banner in the stamping plant proclaims it 'world class.' This is a mistake.
When he sees the quality improvements in the paint shop, Pawley charges paint shop supervisor Don Kreivitz with making big productivity improvements too. 'If you've got guys standing around with nothing to do,' Pawley tells Kreivitz, 'the quality will go down.'
2: 45 p.m.
Operations review in the conference room
Pawley is no more compromising in the conference room than on the factory floor. In front of the three dozen plant and central-office personnel sitting around the perimeter of several long tables, he notes the 'world class' banner in the stamping plant.
Take it down, Pawley tells Ed Glowacki, the manager of the stamping plant, 'because it's not world-class.' Have a little ceremony, and explain why you can't fly it, he says.
When the stamping plant reaches world class performance in quality and productivity, Pawley says, 'I guarantee you, (Chrysler Chairman) Bob Eaton will come here and help you celebrate, and I will too.'
He challenges everyone in the room to concentrate on problems.
Francois Castaing, Chrysler's vice president of vehicle engineering, and Glenn Gardner, general manager of large car platform engineering, have owned up to the design problems in the LH cars, Pawley says. But this plant still has control over 60 percent of the quality issues.
Although workers in the plant were moving fast, Pawley says he didn't see anybody producing more than 70 percent of capacity - that is, they were moving just to get to the work, which doesn't add value.
Pawley praises Glowacki and others in plant management for having concrete plans to meet the 1994 goals for raising productivity and significantly cutting variable costs.
And as Pawley is driven to the Toronto airport for the flight back to Michigan, the people in the plant, both hourly and salaried, are back searching for ways to make the LH doors perfect.
Pawley will be back in three months. His quest to fix the doors and beat Toyota will continue.
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DENNIS PAWLEY
Title: Executive vice president for manufacturing, Chrysler Corp.
Born: May 5, 1941 in Milan, Mich.
Education: Bachelor's degree in human resource development, Oakland University, 1982.
Career highlights: Joined General Motors, 1965; Pontiac Fiero plant manager, 1983; vice president for manufacturing, Mazda Motor Corp. USA, 1986; vice president for operations, Otis Group of United Technologies Corp., 1988; joined Chrysler in March 1989; became executive vice president Dec. 5, 1991.
