Manufacturing

Square D Company – USA, Canada, S America

We did extensive work with Square D Company (Groupe Schneider’s North American subsidiary) at their headquarters in Palatine, Illinois and with operations across the US beginning in 1989. We had previously helped them with such interventions as Professional Management Development Program and Leading and Managing Change. Within their 1200 person engineering division, their concurrent engineering project had been stalled for 2 years. We developed Quality Engineered Development (concurrent engineering) which was a project to alter product development from a sequential to a concurrent process involving engineering design, manufacturing, marketing and sales. Where it had taken years for product development to get to market, the time was reduced to a few months.  This program was a combination of leadership and management development and small group facilitation/consulting. QED was implemented and exceeded targets within 3 months. Our program of Matrix Management for their executive team, helped them reorganize their North American sales and change the manner in which they were operating. We assisted in the development of an international management team for their operations in Mexico. We also conducted customer service modules in their high potential management development programs.

General Motors

The entire GM work force (300,000+ employees) was experiencing an unprecedented amount of change and uncertainty as a result of increased competition. GM needed to create a lean, competitive, and externally focused organization, a considerable shift from its previous 20+ years. It was critical that every supervisor/manager feel comfortable, confident and competent in leading this change. This was pointedly not the case.

The management population was characterized as not being able to create an effective working atmosphere for a number of individual and organizational causes. Our Positive Leadership Program was designed to improve “productivity impact” of 30,000 first and second line supervisors.

After our intervention grievances requiring corporate intervention dropped 20%. In an interview sample of 300 managers 75% commented on instances of direct application of the principles in daily work. A detailed cost benefit analysis showed a program cost of $30,922,500 with an identifiable return of $337,.500,000 for a cost-benefit ratio of 1/11. Areas of impact included reduced voluntary turnover, increased productivity, increased quality, reduced costs. Read the full story

Honeywell-Bull Computer (UK)

An independent survey of Honeywell-Bull Computer customers gave an overall satisfaction level with Customer Services of 41% very good/good, 47% satisfactory, 11% poor/unacceptable. If satisfactory was interpreted as “mediocre” long-term strategy could be at risk. This also represented a downward trend from the previous surveys. A survey of computer users in the UK was conducted by the periodicals Computer Weekly and DataPro comparing overall satisfaction and confidence in companies providing computer service with the results for rating Honeywell as 4th out of 6 providers in mainframes, and 11th out of 13 in Mini systems.

Within a year after Vector Group principals intervened, the Computer Weekly / Datapro survey rated Honeywell /Bull Computer Services as the best out of 8 service providers in the UK. Read the full story