
General Motors Detroit-Hamtramck Plant Manager Teri Quigley
Teri Quigley is the manager of the DHAM assemble plant in Detroit where the Volt is being built. At present over 100 pre-production and 40 salable Volts have been built there, gradually moving toward the first retail car in November.
I had the following discussion with Ms. Quigley
Are there other cars being built at that plant besides the Volt?
Yes we build the Cadillac DTS and the Buick Lucerne
Would you say there is any difference in building a Volt versus a conventional car?
It’s a yes and a no. Obviously sheet metal still goes together like sheet metal for a car. We’ve got different zones for what we would call the swing metal. The doors,the deck lid, the liftgate in the case of the Volt. Hoods and so forth are in discrete zones of the body shop but then they’re all merged on the same car track line through the body shop. They go into the paint shop on the same conveyor and are painted. With this first version of Volts it is a two-tone application and you’ve seen that with the black roof on the cars. Then the cars do progress into general assembly all on the same line.
The major difference is what’s underneath the Volt and so the whole battery marriage and the body marriage is a little bit different but once you get beyond that..the engine compartment is very tight, you’ve got three different heating and cooling systems for the battery pack alone so significantly more hoses and harnesses and what not. Then you get to that point where you’re putting door pads in, your putting interior trim in, your putting wheels and tires on just like any other car.
The components coming in are more unique?
Yeah definitely the components are unique and for us and for our workforce. I give them all this credit, the cars being built today are already pretty highly contented cars in terms of all the options that you can get on a Cadillac or Buick, and so for us the Volt is an incremental step up in technology, but its not a leap for my workforce, they’re pretty accustomed to handling this degree of contented car.
Cars seem incredibly complex and in need of such precision so thousands of pieces can be put together to run properly, how can you orchestrate this to be done so precisely?
What we do with that, and it goes under the GM global manufacturing system, and you’ll hear the term GMS. Its kind of like the Toyota production system, and the key for us being able to build a car repeatable is documented standardized work.
At every workstation out in the shop, each workstation has a job book. It identifies, for example if I’m putting on a door window regulator on the front door, it identifies pretty descriptive things that you have to do to do that correctly to do that safely, and do to it most efficiently so that the customer’s getting a good car.
Standardized work is the tool that we use to ensure that we’ve got the process documented and then training, training, training of the workforce. As I’ve mentioned, went we got into those very slow builds, that’s huge enabler for us. I put folks onto the launch team very early , they were involved in the tech center with the pre-production operations so I had a handful of folks there that helped produce every single car that went through that very early stage.
I had 10 or 12 guys, gals and engineers there just knowing that this car was going to go together differently , and the way you do that is by engaging and involving the people up front. That’s how you start to generate the documentation of the standardized work, you know when you are building it there at PPO, and you build a station and manually move the car and build the next stations, they’re actually able to take the photographs and here’s the order to do this in to help create these job books that I mentioned.
It almost sounds like an instruction manual that you get when you have to assemble something at home.
Exactly.
I’ts been said many times that “GM has to get this car right”, would you say that there are any specifically different quality controls going into building Volt versus other conventional cars?
I would say for sure there is a heightened level of that sense of this thing has got to be right and I would say every person in my plant feels that intensity to a degree. We’ve put in extra intermediate inspection stations, because the car does get buttoned up so tightly, I have to make sure we get it done right before it goes on to the next phase of the build.
We’ve actually added three additional inspection stations to insure that’s all buttoned up before you can’t see it anymore. It’s a layered build, so we put the batteries in and the shields are up, you don’t want to find out after that that something was misrouted.
There’s tender loving care. We’ve had a lot of visibility at the plant which really generates a lot of energy for my team, so that also helps too. Because you know the world is watching, my team has heard me say that a thousand times. We know its important to the company. Its certainly not the only egg we’ve got in the basket, GM has lots of cars coming out, but the world’s watching this one a little differently.
So that trickles down to the people on the line, that sense of purpose that they’re participating in something very important for our world?
Absolutely, the enthusiasm for making history is palpable here.