General Motors Co. is moving up production of its next-generation Malibu to early 2012 — about four months ahead of schedule, a GM official said Monday.
The automaker originally was to start production of its popular midsize car in mid-2012. But at the urging of GM CEO Dan Akerson, production has been moved up by about a quarter, GM spokesman Dave Darovitz told The Detroit News.
"Mr. Akerson requested we study the program to see if we can move quicker and faster," Darovitz said.
The Malibu, a crucial high-volume vehicle for GM, is the automaker's first midsize global car and will be sold in more than 100 countries. It will be unveiled Monday at the Shanghai auto show and shown next week at the New York auto show.
Darovitz said GM took advantage of greater manufacturing flexibility at its factories and efficiencies built into its global platform to accelerate the car's production schedule.
The new Malibu will be built at GM's Fairfax, Kan., and Detroit-Hamtramck plants.
Source : Detroit News
Oh well, this just means that vehicle will be launched with numerous unresolved defects. Shortened by 4 months! Wow! And to expect that these time were gained by increased in efficiency and flexibility is just bollocks! CEOs and managers never learn. But their decisions and actions are only a reflection, a symptom of the problem of how we reward our leaders. Despite what their corporate propaganda says, companies always put short term interest ahead of long term benefits. The stereotype used to be that American companies are most guitly of this. But we have always disagreed with such stereotypes and the recent problems with Toyota proves this. March this year, Toyota announced its Global Vision and one of the reforms to be implemented is extending development schedules by 4 weeks. Toyota have previously admitted that unrealistic development schedules has caused insufficient testing done on its cars and contributed to its recent quality woes.
The problem with cutbacks on field testing and development schedules is that problems will not be uncovered immediately, but years later. As we can see from Toyota's experience. You could almost chart their meteroic rise in the world's sales charts, under then President Katsuaki Watanabe who embarked on massive expansion into new markets and new segments. Audi too learned its lessons when the first generation Audi TT was rushed into production. The car was later found to be unstable at high speeds, resulting in a several high profile crashes and recall had to initiated to install rear wings and recalibrated ESC to the vehicle. The Mercedes W210 E-class was also another classic example of how quality suffers when cost and resources are cut, all made by the over-ambitious then CEO Jurgen Schrempp. Then there is the famous Ford Pinto's exploding fuel tank issue.
Truth is that you can never maintain quality while cutting down on cost and development / testing time. It's all a balancing act between pleasing shareholders and to meeting minimum standards, and cross your fingers that nothing serious will be uncovered. Increasing efficiency, improved quality, at lower cost, in shorter time; that's just the kind of rubbish management consultants will tell you when trying to sell some management tools. There is very little evidence that cutting down on time and resources while maintaining quality can be sustainable to an organization. Sooner or later, the faults will show and the staff will be hurt. I said staff, because at the end of the day, the lower ranking employees are the ones tasked to solve a problem that they didn't create in the first place.
What most people miss during Akio Toyoda's annoucement of Toyota's new Global Vision was that Vice-Chairman Katsuaki Watanabe have been dropped from the board, along with 16 other board executives. The position of a vice-chairman is largely ceremonial and exists as part of the oddities of Japanese corporate culture to show respect to their past presidents / leaders, and they still enjoy fat perks from the company while the company hires underpaid temporary workers to get the actual job done. Over reliance on cheaper, temporary contract workers was also one of the reason identified as the cause for Toyota's woes. Critics of American management against the big fat paychecks enjoyed by American CEOs often forget / don't realize this similar unfair arrangements also exist in more subtle forms in Japanese organizations. Greed is an original sin of human nature. It does not recognize ethnicity or nationality. Widening gap between haves and have-nots is happening across all nationalities and culture.
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