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It's back to the 'campus' for Big Three engineers
It may not be the Ivy League, but automakers are going rah-rah over the idea of creating campus-like facilities.
The goal is to get their product-development teams and support staffs together at one spot where they can work together closely, speeding communication and turning out better vehicles faster. Fostering a "collegial atmosphere" doubtlessly would send shivers down the spines of the non-college-trained folks who built the industry in the first place. Still, campus isn't a bad description of what's going on. General Motors Corp.'s Truck Group dominates the recently developed Centerpoint Business Campus in Pontiac, MI, on the site of an aging GM factory. GM's nearby corporate Technical Center in Warren, designed by famed architect Eero Saarinen, looked like a campus when it opened in 1956 and still does. But by today's standards, it's too spread out for solid, multi-discipline teamwork. GM is moving quickly to bring it up to snuff.
At Ford Motor Co., the honchos affectionately refer to their sprawling facilities as the "Dearborn Campus."
Chrysler Corp. doesn't call its facilities a campus, at least not yet. But the No. 3 automaker actually pioneered the trend when it built the new $1 billion Chrysler Technical Center (CTC), which opened more than five years ago in Auburn Hills, MI. Everything Chrysler needs to design, develop, engineer, test, manufacture and market its products is based at CTC - or soon will be.
"Our business is composed of three parts - creation of vehicles; assembly and shipping; and, finally, marketing, servicing and pricing," explains Francois J. Castaing, Chrysler executive vice president-international and general manager of powertrain operations.
"The first process, the one that creates, has a great benefit in what we call co-location. It makes sense for people to be together in reasonable-size teams because it's about communication and the intense exchange between people of different disciplines over a short period of time," he adds.
While Chrysler spearheaded consolidation with its LH pasenger-car platform in 1988, Mr. Castaing says his old AMC employer really began adopting co-location much earlier. Of course, it was easier for AMC with its substantially smaller technical team. Mr. Castaing says outside observers viewed Chrysler in 1988 as financially viable but that...