Extreme employees
Borg-Warner Automotive 
succeeds with an 
empowered, involved 
workforce

by Paul V. Arnold


"The door is always open."

Managers drop that line to their employees as a way of expressing, "If you have a problem, a solution or an idea, let me know."

But how many times do managers or employees take advantage of that information opportunity?  Occasionally?  Rarely?  Never?

If the door is open 10 percent of the time at your company, or open to 10 percent of the employees, 90 percent of the problems or solutions may be overlooked.

"In the typical American company, all the ideas and solutions come from top management and are pushed down into the organization.  That's a very 1970-ish mind-set, but it's still prevalent," says Ron Ames, the plant manager for Borg-Warner Automotive's manufacturing facility in Frankfort, Ill.

"For a company to compete globally today, you must use everybody's ideas.  If you only use the ideas of 10 percent of the people in the plant, you are competing against companies in Japan that use everybody's ideas.  For 500-employee plants, you're using 50 vs. 500.  You're going to lose."

Borg-Warner is one U.S. company stressing the power of people.  The active pursuit of openness, and the creation of skilled, empowered and involved employees, are major reasons why Borg-Warner consistently beats its competition.

An examination of the Frankfort plant, the world's largest producer of automatic transmission bands, provides a glimpse of Borg-Warner's "extreme employees."

More than just a job
When Katreania Johnson took a production job at Frankfort in 1996, she heard the spiel.   People made the difference.  Her opinions mattered.  She could contribute in a bunch of ways.  Yada, yada, yada.  She had heard that at other jobs.

Her new employers sought to remove any lingering doubts.  "No, we mean it," they said.  By the end of her first week, Johnson believed.

"I noticed this 'open' atmosphere right away," she says.  "It has grown on me."

And it has allowed Johnson to grow as a Borg-Warner employee.  In the past 12 months, she has:
-- been a member of an Extreme Team, a kaizen-type unit that uses each member's intuition and insights to find solutions to plant problems;
-- been exposed to a host of machines and processes under the plant's cross-training program;
-- created and implemented more than a half-dozen improvement projects under a program called Qwik Fit; and,
-- earned weekly and monthly bonuses for her Qwik Fit projects.

"For the most part, I think people are looking for more from their jobs," says Ames, who has run the suburban Chicago plant for the past year and a half.  "All we are doing is providing them that opportunity.  We still have a few people who just want to come to work, do their job and go home, but that is a small minority."

Opportunities, not prodding, work to reduce that group's size.

"We recognize that we aren't going to get 100 percent participation," says product line manager Kathleen Lodico.  "If you're a good worker, but you don't want to do the high-level participatory stuff, that's OK.  We prefer that you did, and we prefer that you be a team member, but you don't have to.  We won't force you.   Now, there are things that we expect as part of the job that we didn't in the past."

Requirements include job rotation (moving to a different task as frequently as every four hours); training (around 30 hours a year); and filling out performance boards.

On the boards, located throughout the plant, employees supply daily productivity, safety and quality information for their work area.

"Those requirements are the minimum things," says Lodico.  "The other things are providing an opportunity to improve yourself."

And improve the safety, strength and profitability of the plant.

What about BOBs?
When visiting a sister plant or benchmarking a facility in or out of the automotive industry, Borg-Warner managers look for BOBs.

BOB isn't a person.  It's an acro-nym for a "best-of-the-best" practice.

"Ron McCoy (a vice president of operations and former associate of consultant W. Edwards Deming) is a big proponent of the learning organization and also of sharing, where you are not stealing others' ideas, but improving on those ideas," says Ames.   "He came up with the BOBs acronym and it's a way we can standardize best practices throughout Borg-Warner."

Frankfort's Extreme Team program has its roots in a BOB.

"It developed out of the kaizen blitz program that we had seen a lot of companies have success with," says continuous improvement coordinator Gary English.

As with most BOBs, Frankfort took the idea (kaizen), and the observations made from plant visits, and developed a program that met its needs and goals.  The Extreme Team concept was born.

The Ex Files
In a kaizen event, team members from a variety of job backgrounds receive identification and troubleshooting training.  They are then sent to a particular area to solve a particular problem.

In an Extreme Team event, team members from a variety of job backgrounds receive identification and troubleshooting training.  They are then sent to a particular area.  But that's where the similarities end.  Team members decide the group's goals and pinpoint problems they feel need addressing.

"When we (improvement, quality and engineering managers) started this program in Dec. 1998, we'd go out and investigate an area and set up a list of five or six goals for the team to attack," says English.  "They were pretty generic goals, such as improve the area's throughput and decrease the scrap rate.  But we found as we went along that the team was uncovering other things, things that would have a bigger impact to the bottom line than the goals that we had originally stated.  So we backed down.   Now, we go in with goals in the back of our mind, and if the team has problems, we pull those out.  But we haven't had to yet."

Teams -- consisting of four to six operators, plus a plant-floor team leader, maintenance employee and engineer -- change machinery layout, processes and attitudes.

"I'm glad we started the 'Ex' Teams because there are things that need to be fixed or changed," says Johnson, who had a spot on one of the first teams.  "On my team, I think some people were nervous at first because supervisors were on the team.   But I told them, 'Don't worry.  Say what you feel.  We're all members of the team.'  When everyone opened up, we got a lot done."

The group targeted one of the plant's aftermarket work cells.  Among the results:
-- After listening to operators comment about parts that crept along a conveyor belt, the team worked to increase the belt's speed.  The change pleased operators and boosted productivity.
-- Team members noticed that operators had to walk back and forth between a part oiler and a furnace.  By moving the oiler behind the furnace, travel time decreased and parts production increased.

"Most teams have impacted the bottom line because we don't just use the kaizen approach, but we tie in constraint management and demand flow," says English.

Under constraint management theory, you examine the entire system rather than a single operation.  You find the limiting factors in the system (what prevents you from maximizing the system?) and focus all energies toward opening up the flow through the system.

Under demand flow theory, the goal is to flow product through the plant to a point where you hold a minimum amount of inventory.  You examine what restricts flow through your building or process and direct initiatives or resources toward that restriction.

Thirteen weeklong Extreme Team events were held in 1999.  Nineteen are slated for 2000.

Qwik Fit, lasting impressions
While BOBs are an outlet of change for supervisors, hourly workers can make their ideas and visions known through the Qwik Fit program.

Started in 1998, the program has generated more than 100 changes that have saved the plant hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"It's not a suggestion program, it's an implementation program," says Lodico.   "Rather than a traditional suggestion program where, 'Here's my suggestion, now you go work on it,' the employee with the idea is responsible for pushing it through.   They are the drivers."

The employee outlines his or her idea on a Qwik Fit form and presents it to a supervisor.   If the idea is approved to continue (95 percent are, says Lodico), the supervisor suggests experts (engineers, maintenance personnel, or a quality or safety manager) who the employee can use as a resource or co-worker on the project.  Employees work on Qwik Fit projects during downtime or a changeover, during a shift overlap, after their shift or at home.

"I've had people come in with computer-generated printouts from home," says Lodico.  "They'll say, 'Last night, I figured this out.'"

If the project merits it, employees can receive special time during
their shift to work on a Qwik Fit.

"The projects can be simple or elaborate," says technical services manager Maynard Loy.  "We've had people get a piece of machinery painted so it's easier to see, and we've had Qwik Fits that have involved design engineering."

Johnson says her head is full of Qwik Fit projects.

"Some ideas jump out at you," she says.  "On one machine in my area, shorter people had to reach up and over all day long.  It was awkward."

Not only did this affect productivity for such people, but it compromised quality and safety.  Johnson helped create a mobile stand that workers could bring to this station.

"Now, you are over the machine," she says.  "It's more comfortable."

The benefits can be huge.  A 1998 Qwik Fit implemented by mill-pocket operator Ernie Hatfield saved the plant $80,000.

Employees also cash in.  Projects can earn individuals or teams a $50 gift certificate in a weekly drawing and a $500 certificate in a monthly drawing.

"I have a maintenance electrician who has turned this into a cottage industry for himself," says Loy.

A total of 198 of the plant's 500 employees participated in the Qwik Fit program in 1998.   In 1999, 123 participated through September.

"The problem is, we're getting too many suggestions," says Lodico.   "We're overloading my process and quality engineers and my supervisors where they just don't have the hours in the day to help with all the suggestions.  We've had to prioritize some of them."

Watching over quality, safety
It's been said that nobody knows a plant's machines and processes better than the people who work on the plant floor every day.  The Borg-Warner plant has taken that to its logical progression in the fields of quality and safety.

Frankfort does not have quality inspectors or a cadre of safety managers.  Quality control and safety issues are, for the most part, in the hands of hourly workers.

"We have a quality manager, two reliability technicians and a safety specialist, and that's our entire quality and safety department," says Ames.  "We have safety teams facilitated by our safety specialist, but those teams consist of hourly workers from the shop floor.  They do the safety inspections and write up discrepancies.  Then the product line teams resolve any issues."

Regarding quality, supervisors say "quality is built into the manufacturing system.   Operators control the system."

Quality and safety have improved with this arrangement.  The rate of defective parts per million has gone from 1,020 in 1996 to 309 in 1997 to an average of 58.7 for 1998 through Sept. '99.

Regarding safety, the plant surpassed 500,000 work hours without a lost-time accident in 1998.  Numbers from 1999 were nearly as stellar.

"We've done great things, but nobody is resting on their laurels," says Ames.   "We are in an extremely tough market.  The only way to meet everybody's expectations is to continuously improve.  Everyone here is committed to that."


This article appeared in the December 1999/January 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine.  Copyright 2000.

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