How - Dov Seidman [116]
The special nature of GE/Durham does not reveal itself in its WHATS but rather in its HOWS, as a remarkable article in Fast Company magazine reported.2 Over 200 people work at GE/Durham, a tiny part of a massive conglomerate, and nearly everyone, with the exception of a couple of dozen support personnel, is a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-rated technician. All work in teams of less than 20 techs whose only command from management is the date their engine is scheduled to ship. The team decides everything else, from the uncrating of the first part to the moment a team member hops on a forklift to deliver the completed engine to shipping. Each team selects one member to sit on each of nine councils to address issues such as human resources, materials, and training. Membership rotates regularly, and each council addresses a critical component of the principles that drive plant safety, quality, people, and processes.
There are a number of things conspicuously absent from the Durham plant. A time clock, for one. With the exception of a daily team meeting to allow the two shifts to synchronize activity, workers come and go as they like. There is no cleaning crew; everyone cleans up after themselves and the place is spotless. There is no tool lockup; if you can trust people to build an aircraft engine, you can trust them not to walk off with a torque wrench. There is only one boss at GE/Durham, the plant manager, and everyone reports to him. Or more accurately, they don’t report to him.
GE/Durham builds some of the most sophisticated machines on the planet in a high-trust, high-communication environment with no bosses but one. What does he or she do? Paula Sims, who led the plant four of its first six years of operation, says she focused on the big picture, growth and improvement. She also focused on something GE/Durham has in abundance: trust. She learned that lesson the hard way. “Not long after I started here,” she reported, “an employee came to me and said, ‘Paula, you realize you don’t need to follow up with us to make sure we’re doing what we agreed to do. If we say we’ll do something, we’ll do it.’ I sat back and thought, ‘Wow. That’s so simple. I’m sending the message that I don’t trust people because I always follow up.’ ”
This seemingly ungoverned culture has achieved some remarkable things in its relatively short life. Over the course of five years in the late 1990s, GE/Durham reduced the cost of airplane engine assembly by over 50 percent. The plant reduced quality defects over 75 percent. One in four engines ships with just a single flaw—usually cosmetic—like a scratch or a misaligned wire. The rest are perfect. In 1999, they added a new engine to their line, the CFM56, a workhorse at that time used in 40 percent of jets flying more than 100 passengers and in production at other GE assembly plants for years. Within nine weeks, they delivered their first engine, 12 to 13 percent cheaper than plants that had built it for years. This amazed Bob McEwan, then general manager of GE’s Evendale assembly operations, where they build the same engines. “Now, down in Durham, you don’t hear about process improvement,” he told Fast Company in the 1999 report. “They are constantly swinging away at it. . . . They have their washers all sorted into holders, like poker chips sorted into trays. You can easily get the washer you want. It’s things like that. They don’t ask anybody—they just go and do it. Down there, you can get more going in a week’s time than you can here in a year.” They have another leg up on their brethren as well. In 2002, Evendale released over 2,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into the air.3 In Durham, they released