First Encounter with "Quick Die Change"

I was there

Article submitted by Mike Cubbin

Back in the late '70s, Chuck Kato (VP of Fisher Body), Pat Colletta (VP of GMAD), Dale Snyder (IE Director of GMAD ) and myself (IE Director of Fisher Body), along with the Group VP Alex Cunningham took one of the very early trips to Japan, basically to review Toyota and Honda assembly and stamping operations. During this two week tour, I had my first opportunity to see 30-minute die changes at Toyota. It was impressive. We were doing 95% of our changes on the 3rd shift and thought we did it pretty well. From a manpower standpoint, the cost per change wasn't radically different when you included all the manpower, but the careful planning was obvious. At the time, we really didn't do much with the information we collected. Yes, there was a little bit of denial and a questioning of the need to spend money for special equipment to facilitate the process. But, a couple years later, when I was managing the Oldsmobile Stamping operations and struggling with making aluminum hoods for the Cutlass, I asked the materials management group a fairly simple question. "I know we can't do it, but if we could change any set of stamping dies in 30 minutes what would the impact be on our operations?" The answer didn't come back for quite a while, but as they looked at storage and shipping racks, floor space, scrap and rework, etc… the savings got to be really big!!

At this point we decided that Oldsmobile would jump into this full bore and change the way we did business in Stamping Operations. It took a considerable period of time to get there, but the benefits became more and more obvious. It is just one example in manufacturing of a process based on "what if," instead of "we can't." I would say that 1980 was the beginning of dramatic change to GM Manufacturing and Oldsmobile was a real leader in this area.


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