Teamwork : Chrysler Builds a Concept as Well as a Car

At Chrysler’s vast assembly plant here, where the company’s new mid-size sedans are scheduled to start rolling off the line in late June, Don Callahan and Brian Large huddle around a half-built Dodge Intrepid, trying to figure out why the warning light on the instrument panel is on even though the air conditioner works fine.

Both are members of the LH cars’ “platform team”: Callahan, an hourly assembly line worker, and Large, a product engineer, have worked together since the first prototype was built nearly two years ago. In a few hours they manage to fix the electrical glitch and send the car on down the line.

If Chrysler had developed the LH like most U.S. vehicles have been developed, Callahan wouldn’t have known to contact Large about the problem, because the two would never have met.

And the early production cars would likely have reached customers’ hands with the electrical system still on the fritz.

But the workers and engineers tentatively fitting together the first test batch of cars here this month are thrashing out the final stages of a vehicle development process that seeks to blur the traditional lines between workers, management and engineers, undermine entrenched hierarchies and subordinate individual achievement to teamwork--all in the name of building a better car.

The platform team, long the standard way of putting cars together among Japanese auto makers, has been officially embraced by Chrysler executives as superior to the compartmentalized “chimney” system still prevalent throughout the U.S. industry. But while each of the Big Three U.S. auto makers has experimented with teams, they have been slow to adopt the seemingly alien system wholesale.

The point of the platform team is simplification: When designers, product engineers, manufacturing engineers, purchasing agents, suppliers and line workers make decisions together from the beginning, it saves time, money and untold hassle when the car finally hits the assembly line.

But at the same time, the team system introduces to product development the unpredictable element of human relations--a wild card far more complex than engineering and assembling the 2,600 parts of a car.

“It’s a culture shock,” says Glenn Gardner, general manager of Chrysler’s LH team, who describes himself as its “coach.” “People lose their identity. They have to establish a new identity, a different esprit de corps. “

Because they were soundly beaten by speedy Japanese product development cycles in the early 1980s, nearly every sector of U.S. manufacturing has moved toward integrating the various stages of product development--with varying degrees of success.

High-tech industries, which are younger and have had less time to build up cumbersome internal barriers, are much further ahead in the process than old-line manufacturing industries, such as steel and machine tools. And the sheer magnitude of car development makes the auto industry’s challenge more formidable than most.

The LH cars, Chrysler’s first new body and chassis combination since the K-cars of the early 1980s, are also the company’s first attempt to develop a large-volume vehicle from start to finish using the team approach. And the troubled auto maker’s investment in the project comes to far more than the $1 billion it took to get this far.

The LH cars, which will be available in the fall at prices ranging from $15,000 to $23,000, represent what may be Chrysler’s last chance to retain its stature as an independent auto maker. The company is depending on high sales volume of the cars--the Dodge Intrepid, Chrysler Concorde and Eagle Vision--to bail it out of its persistently precarious financial situation.

And the LH team’s experience is viewed within the company as a model for changing Chrysler’s culture to the core. But, as the LH team discovered, it takes more than throwing a disparate bunch of people into one space to get them to surrender jealously guarded turf and a value system based on individualism for a nebulous concept called teamwork--even when that concept pays off in time and money saved.

The first six months were the roughest. Instead of sitting next to people with the same professional background and similar duties, the 850 LH team members found themselves surrounded by co-workers they had never met doing things they had never heard of. Ill at ease and disoriented, the team made for “a difficult management job,” Gardner says, and the work was slow going.

Even the team’s executive engineers had a hard time getting the hang of it.

“We would point fingers at each other over timing,” Gardner recalled at a recent staff meeting. “One guy would say, ‘Well, that’s the best I can do. If you want better, go talk to the dumb (metal) stamping guys.’ And I would say, ‘Wait a minute. The dumb stamping guys are on the team, so bring the dumb stamping guys in and we’ll talk together.’ ”

Individualism, a code of behavior drummed into most Americans almost from birth and rewarded as a valuable asset by traditional U.S. corporate culture, had no place in an operation that needed people to value the team’s success above their own if it was to succeed.

To root out this latent tendency, the team managers decided that anybody who pointed a finger of blame at a fellow team member would be called in front of the whole team and publicly embarrassed. A few red-faced examples later, the LH crew began to get the message, and the handful that didn’t were asked to leave.

But such hard-nosed tactics were the exception, as Gardner and his top managers set about trying to create a supportive work environment for the LH team. Trust-building exercises and an emphasis on consensus decision-making were used to help minimize resentment and reduce friction in the ranks. Indeed, after three years of being urged to let down their defenses, share their feelings and bond with their teammates, the LH team exudes a touchy-feely quality more commonly associated with hippie communes than auto manufacturers.

Now, as the plant hums with preparations for the cars’ launch and the LH team scurries to put the finishing touches on the product of their collaborative effort, it is hard to find anyone who would prefer to go back to the old way of doing things.

“I feel like I changed companies without changing companies,” marvels hourly worker Ivan Mijatovic. “I worked here for 25 years and I never had knowledge of how everything came together.”

But such harmony did not spring up overnight, nor is every team member a fan even at this stage of the game. Encrusted stereotypes, the result of years of work within tightly regimented disciplines, colored the way team members viewed each other and sometimes still gets in the way of clear communications.

Hourly worker Don Callahan puts it bluntly:

“I thought they were a bunch of snobs,” he says of cerebral engineer types, such as his friend Brian Large--who admits to rarely setting foot in a plant before the LH project. “But once you get them to talk your language, they’re all right.”

In the days of acute specialization and sharp job demarcations, product engineers considered their work done once they handed the mock-ups over to manufacturing. Now, 15 LH team engineers are assigned to the plant full-time, and dozens of others such as Large flit back and forth frequently.

And while product engineers may have stopped thinking about the manufacturing guys as “tough, macho types who would swear a lot and beat people up,” plant manager John Franciosi says, there are remnants of “turf protection syndrome” and pockets of resistance to Chrysler’s new order, especially among older employees.

But he insists that a combination of peer pressure and recognition that this workplace revolution has solid support from on high is slowly bringing the skeptics around.

The support of key managers who ran interference for the LH team within the company was crucial to its having survived intact throughout the last three years, LH team mangers say.

Francois Castaing, Chrysler’s vice president for engineering, Thomas Stallkamp, purchasing vice president, and President Robert Lutz--Gardner calls them “believers”--helped protect the team from less enthusiastic factions in the company.

Often, these executives signaled their support by simply staying out of the team’s way. One of the LH team’s goals--which members say they have met--was to hash out their problems among themselves rather than lodging usually futile and time-consuming appeals with top management. But even silent allies in high places were useful when company veterans began to feel threatened by the LH team’s deviations from the norm.

For instance, the LH crew decided to build its first prototype 30 weeks earlier than usual. They wanted to use manual versions of the tools that would be used in production and--most heretical of all--invite representatives from manufacturing to help design them. “There was a whole lot of dissidence in the system,” Gardner says. “You’d see people watching us, waiting for us to fail.”

But they were allowed to persevere, and they managed to build the first prototype even two weeks earlier than the accelerated schedule called for.

A Chrysler engineer since 1958, Gardner’s own conversion to the teamwork doctrine came from witnessing Mitsubishi’s version of it when he worked on product development at Diamond-Star, Chrysler’s recently relinquished joint venture with the Japanese auto maker. He has been one of its most fervent advocates ever since.

Still, Gardner admits to the occasional sharp twinge when upholding the precepts of teamwork means things do not go his way. Had he not surrendered his traditional right as program leader to have the final say on major decisions, for example, the cruise control switches would be along the bottom of the steering wheel, rather than along the sides, as they are now.

“It was a heck of a discussion,” Gardner remembers, “but when the consensus overruled me, I told them, ‘I will sell that decision to the company. You will never again hear me say that it would be better to do it along the bottom.’ ”

Other team members benefited from such high-level displays of sportsmanship but, like any bunch of rookies, it took a solid victory before they really came together as a team. For the LH, the turning point was managing to build the first prototype an unheard-of 97 weeks before production.

Working together for the first time so early in the process, the product engineers intent on translating their intricate paper designs into three dimensions had to interact with the production workers and manufacturing engineers. And they pointed out that what works on a single prototype won’t always work when building 75 cars an hour. With a strict, self-imposed deadline hanging over their diverse heads, life was tense at the LH clubhouse.

“We were trying to do it 30 weeks earlier than we’d ever done before,” said Dave Carr, who supervised the three LH prototypes built over the course of the program. “And as we approached that, the pace and excitement began to pick up. And then, when we finished it two weeks early, that was a real milestone for us.”

With this first concrete sign that the LH team had a chance to win, more people both on and outside the team judged it safe to begin rooting for it. And finishing the prototype so early paved the way for more small victories, as several hourly workers, housed at a hotel across the way, pored over the LH’s first incarnation looking for ways to simplify it.

Elias Hajjar, a 24-year assembly line veteran, remembers discovering some design engineer trying to be clever with the headlamp assembly. “We couldn’t even see the screws,” Hajjar says. “How were we supposed to put it together?” By the third prototype, finished 50 weeks before production, the headlamp screws were in full sight.

With production workers there to show them why parts of their design would not work at assembly line speed, product engineers were less protective of their original work, and changes that might have taken weeks--or not materialized at all--happened in days. And when the workers’ suggestions were not taken, explanations for why the design needed to stay the way it was helped avert resentment and potential battles farther down the line.

But fostering such interaction was not without its costs. By the third prototype, the LH team was paying the wages of 80 hourly workers who would not ordinarily have started work until six weeks before production--plus footing their hotel bills. And the plant, which phased out the poor-selling Eagle Premier and Dodge Monaco in December, has been down much longer than usual in a model changeover to allow for the earlier test-runs of the production process.

But the LH team leaders say the improvement in quality and elimination of problems caught before they became more expensive to fix greatly outweigh such expenses. And the team system’s radical redefinition of job descriptions also means that it can reduce the number of players, as fewer people do more things.

Indeed, some manufacturing engineers, who have typically acted as liaisons between the plant and the product engineers back in Detroit, fear that their whole discipline may disappear if workers and product engineers keep talking to each other so much.

But so far, the team approach appears to be paying off. The LH team has shaved a full year off Chrysler’s average vehicle-development cycle of 4 1/4 years. And they did it with 40% fewer engineers than a typical product program would use. At a price tag of just over $1 billion, the LH budget came in well under those of two other well-known team efforts, Ford’s $3-billion Taurus/Sable and GM’s $3.5-billion Saturn.

But the test of all the early collaborative efforts will be in the production process. If all goes as planned, Franciosi estimates that each car will take about 23.7 hours to build, making the plant among the industry’s most productive. And so far, as the first early production cars come off the line, he is optimistic.

“The fellows out there are verifying the process,” Franciosi says, “as opposed to what they’d traditionally be doing at this time, like trying to figure out what the hell goes where.”

There is a hushed sense of anticipation in the noisy plant, as the LH team’s work begins to take its final, tangible form. Engineer Dave Hamilton points proudly to one of them, a pallet on which the entire underbody of the car will be built and then inserted into the body. The tool is a first for Chrysler: Previously, cars had been suspended above the line and work was done overhead, making for sore arms and the usual quality problems associated with any difficult part of a production process.

But even as its project nears completion, the LH team continues to wrestle with the problems of its own structure and how to apply its experience to its next project.

Gardner, who has moved on to head the development of Chrysler’s new large car, due out in 1995, has tried to bring the LH team with him. But although it remains largely intact, there are those who simply preferred to go back to their own specialized departments rather than continue to experiment with teamwork.

And the question of rewards and promotions that comes up naturally at the end of a big project is one the LH team and Chrysler have not yet ironed out.

“In Western culture we tend to reward high-pull people and not team players,” Gardner says. “So how do you reward someone in a system that promotes teamwork and sort of neuters individualism? That’s a struggle.”

If the benefits of the team system are all that its advocates on the LH team claim, then it is crucial that they find a way to teach the rest of the company what they have learned. Although Chrysler is the closest of the U.S. auto makers to institutionalizing the team system, the LH veterans have experienced some difficulty in getting others to listen to them.

The team working on Chrysler’s new small car--the first to reap the benefits of the company’s new, $1-billion technical center, where they have taken over an entire floor--didn’t want the LH guys peering over their shoulders when they started work last year.

“They felt we were trying to tell them how to do it,” Gardner says. “They kept getting the LH rubbed into their face.”

Still, team-building has become enough of a ritual at the company that the LH people can pinpoint where their counterparts stand in a process they have just come through. Finishing up a staff meeting earlier this month, the LH managers agreed that the small-car team had reached the “passion stage,” while the minivan team was just approaching it.

As for the LH team, Gardner says, “we don’t have time to be passionate about things now except getting problems fixed. Reality is setting in. This is it.”

Indeed, what helped drive the LH team all along was the knowledge that their cars’ reception will determine whether other Chrysler teams get the opportunity to reach the “passion stage”--or even exist at all, given Chrysler’s financial health.

“There’s more risk. There’s a lot more risk,” says executive engineer Don Goodwin of the team system. “What we have going for us is that everyone wants the car to succeed in the worst way, because we know we may not get another chance. So most of the time, the risks are worth taking.”

Working Together

* Where initiated: The teamwork concept in auto manufacturing was developed in the United States, but the Japanese have been its biggest adherents in recent years.

* What it entails: Under the teamwork doctrine, product engineers, manufacturing engineers, production workers, financial administrators, suppliers and others pool knowledge, work simultaneously and make decisions by consensus. Under the compartmentalized “chimney” system used in most of the U.S. auto industry, people from different disciplines work in sequence, rarely communicate, and decisions are imposed by high-level management.

* Use in U.S.: The Big Three auto makers have used teamwork to produce their vehicles, with varying success and commitment. Ford used it first on the Taurus in the mid-1980s. General Motors set up its new Saturn division based on a team structure. Chrysler is the U.S. maker closest to institutionalizing the team system throughout its vehicle development programs, but each of the Big Three is working toward reorganizing its structure and culture around teams.

Source: Chrysler, Ford, GM