May/June 2006

Photo:GUS PIKULA / UAW LOCAL 212

Toolroom final assembly cell members (front to back) Kevin Trombley, Michael Philippo, Edward Blaszkiewicz and Vito Stefanoski.

Credit Mt. Elliott Tool and Die’s
phenomenal turnaround to

Teamwork

In this age of intense global competition, U.S. companies do have alternatives to closing plants and moving work overseas.

They can listen to their workers and profit from the years of knowledge gained from shop floor experience. That’s how one dire situation was turned around at a DaimlerChrysler plant in Detroit.

“It is just phenomenal that in 2003 Mt. Elliott Tool and Die was considered to be noncompetitive and on the road to closing, and now less than three years later it receives DaimlerChrysler’s Manufacturing Excellence Award for being ‘the best of the best,’ ” said UAW Vice President Nate Gooden, who directs the union’s DaimlerChrysler Department.

This remarkable turnaround shows what can be done if the commitment is there from the company to include workers in solving problems. Where two-thirds of all dies used in stamping outer panels for DaimlerChrysler vehicles once were built by outside, nonunion suppliers, now all are made at Mt. Elliott.

The workforce that dipped to around 180 in 2003 has grown to 231 UAW tool makers, die makers and other workers today, with another 25 to 40 expected to be brought back from layoff by the end of the year.

Mt. Elliott tool and die workers and engineers literally circled the globe in search of new ideas to make their facility more competitive; they visited facilities in Asia, Europe and South America. But some of the best ideas were homegrown.

“The idea of cells came from workers right here on the shop floor,” said Roy Hamilton, UAW Local 212 president and a tool process engineer. “This completely changed the way we produced dies.”

In the old way, two die makers would work on a single die from beginning to end. Under the new process, dies move along from cell to cell, that is, from one team to another, with each team responsible for solving problems and signing off when its part of the job is done.

Quality and productivity have soared ever since. Previously it took 100 die workers to produce 56 dies a year at Mt. Elliott. Now 87 die makers produce 104 dies in the same time span.

With dies delivered in three months instead of five, the capacity exists to build more dies in-house, and more workers are brought back to do the additional work.

Listening to workers not only saves jobs, it creates jobs.

Sam Stark