THEPEOPLE- THEPROOUCT- THEPROCESS

by GERRY KOBE

•eer enc mar In

The less you "know" the more you'll benefit.

Analysis. He heads a l O-person team atNAG headquarters. "G M corporate- Ievelbenchmarking is a small gro up of peoplefacilitatingthe process,"Trarsk says."We're working withevery major pro­gram including powertrain progr..imsworldwide. So we're notdoing a 101 ofthe benchmarking-ten peop le can' t dothat. We do make surethose teams aresharing informationandusing the samebasic resources to make sure they know

how to do this."In addition. there is a tear­down group that has Hteam

of experts, but theyrel y on people fromthe platform to do

most of the work.That way the peo­ple who impl e­

mcnt the resultsarc the peo ple who

did the study," he says.To mHny engineers. a

teardown is benchmark­ing, because it is the most effective wayto learn about the competition. How­ever, because teardowns areexpensive.time-consuming and redundant betwee ncompanies, the Big Three arcconsider­ing somejoint efforts.

Dr. John McTague. Ford VicePresident-Technical Affairs. says"Teardowns are very cost ly. and whilewe will always do ourown teardownsof our most import ant competitorproducts. we recently began doingjoint teardowns.... Thus far, we havedone one. That pilot was perfo rmed byChrysler, which a lso supplied thevehicle- a Renault Espacc.

"The purpose." Mc'Tague co ntinues,"was to determine how many differentor unique pans Renault had to designfor right-hand drive as opposed to left -

Lexus LS400 is the most highly bench­marked vehicle In existence.

I980s. Japan did a masterful j ob ofbenchmarking products and processesfor the US market . At the time.Japanese companies had only a rudi­mentary understanding of wants andpre ferences in thi s co untry. But theyused that lack of know led ge to theiradvantage. Th ey asked. they liste ned ,they copied , they improved , theylearned. Today the US concedes thesmall electronics

industry to Japanese-owned compa­nies. and the domestic auto industry isonly now starting to regain share lostto Japan.

One of the reasons the US autoindustry is on the rebound is that weare learning the benefits of bench­marking analys is. and appl ying themwith predi ctable res ults. In fac t, GMhas issued a corporate mandate thatevery new vehicle program must beben ch marked from a program invest­ment and product cost standpoint. pri­or to concept initiation.

James Trask is GM's DirectorofWorldwide Benchmarking and Business

he success ofChrys ler's miniv anis an example ofbenchmarking at itsfinest. A bullseyeon the day it wasintrod uced , and stillthe seg ment's run ­

away best-seller. the minivan is evi­dence that successful benchmarkingproduces a new way of thinking andpositive change. As simple as thatsounds. very few companies everachieve the results that Chrysler did,and admittedl y, Chryslerachieved them almost byaccident.

"Benchmarkingis learning:' saysGlenn Gardner,GeneralManager­Large CarPlatformEngineering andformer ProgramManager for theminivan. "We cameclose 10 perfection on the minivanbecause we didn't try to influence any­thing -we just learne d. Now look atwha t Ford and GM did and you cansec they d idn' t let the informa tion theygai ned enlighten them enough to dothe right thing.

" But," Ga rdner emphasizes. :,(could al most guarantee you that ifChrysler had a small pickup truck atthe time, wi th small engines . smallaxles and sma ll transmissions alreadytooled. we might have made the samemistake. GM and Ford benchmarkedthe seg ment, but they had decided ontheir answers before they asked theirquestions."

Similarly, throughout the 1970s and

hand drive on the same platform." Heoffers that Ford may be next to do acomparative teardown later this year.

GM, although involved in the firstteardown, may be having secondthoughts about the agreement. At thevery least. it is more conservative thanFord and Chrysler. "We may havesome things we can share," says Trask,"but we look at this as a fundamentalinvestment in people. Benchmarki ng isa way to make people think about whatthey do. It helps us break out of ourtraditio nal way of thinking so we needto do it ourselves. and we want theinformation to stay in the heads of thepeople who work here."

Tra sk also expresses concern thatwhile some joint teardowns are intheir infancy , he foresees legal prob­lems if there is any sharing of the

GM has teardown facility for disassem­

bly and examination of competitive

cars. Though the Big Three have sharedteardown information GM may opt out

of further participation.

implications of what is found. "Wecan share access to parts without anyproblem," he says. "There may be val­ue in that, although there seems verylittle. But the actual information youlearn, that is, what will make you dothings differently, that needs to bekept propr ietary."

Part of what Trask wants to protect isthe science of how to conduct a bench-

marking session. And the degree ofinformation that can be gleaned by atrained eye. For example, weight analy­sis is eas ily measured since parts can bedisassembled and weighed. There is nosecret there. But skilled teardownexperts look at the condi tion of screwheads to determine installation angleand therefore assembly line ergonom­ics. They measure and record torque at

which fasteners areinstalled. Even sheetmetal is dusted with"fingerprint kits" toreveal clamp locations.

If all of this seemsfanatical, it' s onlygoing to get moreintense. Companies arc finally realiz­ing that benchmarking is one of thebiggest tools Japan used to drive theirtime-to-market times down. "As theJapanese showed us, we are going tohave to do things more analyticallyand with prior knowledge: ' saysGardner. "No more cut-and-try. put itin a car, see what people think andthen change. We don' t have the time.

"Japan copied us for years: ' he con­tinues. "We have to just take that as acompliment and copy them right back.If we go out and identify a design thatis the lightest, highest quality and sat­isfies the most customers, and itdoesn 't happen to he ours--copy it.The important thing is that we give thecustomer a great car. That doesn' t

mean you have toinvent everything todo it:'

Where benchmarkinformation reallybecomes clouded isin highly subjectiveareas such as steering

response. (Jut that is where sciencemarries the voice-of-the-customer.With subjective matters, the prefer­ence of the testing engineer takes aback seat to the information providedby market ing. Careful studies of thetarget customer help decide the correct"feel. sound or appeara nce: ' And inthose situations, engineering decisionsare usually done by team consensus.

Surpri singly, the real growth ofbenchmarking is now taking placemore in internal operati ons and manu­facturing than in product. Major busi­ness operations like compensation,accounts payable and vehicle orderingare being compared- particularlyagainst non-com peting businesses­for new ideas. According to Trask.

Baldridge Award -winning companiesare being deluged with requests toreview their operations.

Sandy Munro, President of Troy,Ml-based Munro & Associates, saysthe industry needs to recognize thecommon threads that make bench­marking-product or internal- a suc­cess . "First you need an enlightenedleadership, committed to the goal ofthe com pany: ' he says. 'T hat is, makemoney for the shareholders . Seco nd,that leadership must understand thatpeople make the organization . Finally,it must recognize that engineeringcontrols profitability:'

Munro says that ident ifying trans­ferable technologies and the inventingof revolutionary ideas is the easy part .The hard part lies in the acceptance ofthese new ideas and paradigm shifts.To that end he suggests that a compa­ny' s first benchmarking trip focus onthe changes that are bound to happenwithin the company. "Remember:'Munro says , "change favors the pre­pared mind: ' ~