BILL J. - I got along GREAT with all my engineers and QA people. They were ALL my Customer's in the Deming way of running a mfg company. It was just REALLY hard to keep in mind they were my customers and the Best and brightest in their chosen discipline when they could not make a decision to save their soul, right or wrong. Then 3-4 months later after they finally made a decision, we find out they were WRONG anyhow.
Reason I left my last job, not by choice, was the fact I was paid too much because I was magnetudes better than the other 5-6 people in the dept. I never got less than $300,000 cost savings per year, most years between $500,000 and a Million Dollars, reduced non-comforming parts to less than 5% of first year's total in about three-four years, was chosen by the QA mgr to be purchasing's ISO 9000 internal auditor, had fewer hot parts on a day-to-day basis than anyone else, so yes, the three metric, Price, Deliver, and Quality were ALL met. I also stood in for the Purchasing Mgr. in most of his weekly meetings when he was unable to attend, and frankly, most of the rest of the people would have rather had me there ALL the time. And just for the record BILL, the last co-worker in purchasing that I worked with LEFT within 2-1/2 years of when I was let go, the new management group sucked. One guy retired, the rest were fired or quit. A total of 50 people left our little plant, plus two other larger plants were shuttered all due to a joint venture that didn't go at all well.
KRAIG - I had that job too for several years... I wore every "hat" in the company except 2, maybe three.
MIKE F. - I hear exactly what you're saying, the fact your forgetting is IH built CC's in a different time, "off-shore" wasn't an option, more business with a customer like IH was highly sought after. The added volume of business with IH off-set a LOT of over-head at many of our suppliers. Yes, you do eventually run up against things like raw material price increases that you absolutely can not avoid. The last 5 yrs I worked at my last job the copper content in my brass machine screw parts and castings went from 80 cents/# to over $4/pound. Record high copper price on the LME. Same thing happened on the nickel content of 304 stainless steel. The wrought metal cost $1.25/pound, the nickel surcharge was $1.30/pound. The mills & service centers won't negotiate on the surcharge, pay it or they won't ship and shut you down.
If Kohler was going to stop using the S/G and they came in to tell the buyer that, that purchasing person better darn well have someone in an engineering management position in that meeting and somebody from marketing too. Or the buyer will be labeled a "Fire Bomb thrower" like Bill says.
Even if the change to a Bendix style starter was the ONLY change IH made, it would have taken IH thousands of engineering hours to prototype, then pilot, then do all the eng. change notices, routings, prints, etc. required. Back then IH followed an ISO 9000 compliant mfg. system, but NOTHING in engineering was computerized... all the documents were hard copies.
