Defiance Foundry - Plant 2
It was the fall of 1964, and an announcement was made that a new foundry would be built in Defiance, Ohio, for the production of nodular iron. It was to replace the more costly malleable iron and steel currently used to produce crankshafts, steering knuckles, disc brake calipers, and differential carriers; for the corporation’s cars.
It was a heady time for a new engineer, freshly graduated from GMI (General Motors Institute) with an electrical engineering degree, and assigned to the Maintenance Department. With the announcement came the direction that the plant had to be built in a record eleven months time – an impossible assignment. The engineers were asked what the obstacles would be, and they were attacked one by one. As an example, one problem expected to cause delays would be equipment delivery problems. The solution was to assign a purchasing person to the plant, with a massive expediting system at his disposal. If a vendor informed one of our engineers of a week’s delay in delivery, the engineer would immediately report it to the expediter. Within minutes, the vendor company’s president would receive a phone call from a top GM executive, telling him the delay was unacceptable.
Likewise, the engineering had to be kept on an equally tight schedule. At the time equipment installation begins, on any project, the engineer has to spend a lot of time in the field supervising, and resolving interference problems. When that time came on this project, the engineers were deeply involved in engineering the later phases of the project; which also couldn’t be delayed. That’s where I, and others from the Maintenance Department, came in.
We were each trained on the field order procedure, and sent into the construction areas as the corporate representatives on the project, in order to free up our engineers. All contractors were told what our role was - to resolve all interference problems. When an item came to our attention, we would immediately evaluate it, and select the lowest cost, or timely, correction; and assign it to the proper contractor. We had to move immediately, and there was no right or wrong decision. The only wrong decision was a delay in deciding, and it helped keep the project on schedule. In fact, from breaking ground to pouring iron took ten months, and eighteen days, beating the original schedule by two weeks.
That, by itself, was a major learning experience and confidence builder for one as new as I, but then came the debug operations.
Since major construction was still taking place, and hundreds of contractors still were on site, the debug of the first foundry line took place on third shift. The entire group assigned to the plant, including the plant manager, now went on the night shift. My job was to come in with a crew at 7:00 pm, attend a group meeting regarding the night’s operations, and then spend three hours making sure all materials were removed from the equipment that would be running. Everything had to be cleaned up and ready.
At 11:00 pm, operations began. Of course, those early runs involved more down time than run time, but that’s what we were there for. After the night’s operations, during which we took voluminous notes, we met with the first shift at 7:00 am, and assigned projects for the day. At 7:30 am, there was a large group meeting chaired by the plant manager, and involved everyone from the de-bug operations. I remember many times when a complicated issue arose, in which the correction would take considerable investigation. At those times, the manager would say, “You, and you. Go to the back of the room, and in one-half hour, come back and report what we will do. Next item”!
Those meetings would last every day until 11:00am or noon, and I would have to be back in the plant at 7:00pm that night. That lasted for the summer, and there were very few days I wasn’t looking forward to coming back in.
Those from that era are mostly gone, now; but there exists a comradeship among everyone that was there. It was probably an experience that cannot be repeated, but it was something I kept in mind the rest of my career – what a person can accomplish when all obstacles are removed from his path. I guess a bureaucracy is required in large organizations, for approval chains of commands, and financial approvals, but wouldn’t it be great if they weren’t? The building of our Plant 2, showed what can be done when an entire corporation are all together on the same page.
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