GM Trims Engineering Infrastructure for Better Efficiency

It looks that sometimes it is better to take a closer look inside closed doors in order find a solution for a problem, the best example for the the saying would be GM. The manufacturer recorded $1 billion investments in projects which didn’t see the daylight. This happened mainly due to engineers who developed projects which had less to deal with the manufacturer's objectives. GM seeks to make the product development more efficient, as many times the company has started vehicle projects from zero when it could very well borrow underpinnings from other projects.

Furthermore the Chief Financial Officer Dan Ammann explained that the manufacturer had posted profits in a weak global auto market, but that is not enough as the manufacturer aims to be the best on its segment. “All of the things we need to do are, by and large, in our control. We’re not relying on heroic market share gains. We’re not relying on substantial economic recovery.” Dan Ammann Chief Financial Officer was quoted as saying by Detroit Free Press. One of General Motors strategy would be to keep product-development investments constant thus, dropping the bad habits of starting projects which never became reality.

“We’d be deep — half way, two-thirds of the way through — on a project, and we’d cancel it because of a weakening economy.The start-stop, on-again, off-again, herky-jerky nature of our product development process was very disruptive, and it produced poor products.” GM CEO Dan Akerson was quoted as saying by the aforementioned source.

As a viable solution GM plans to simplify the developing procedure in order to gain more manufacturing speed and at the same time it should be able to improve engineering process and the finished quality of their products. As a first step on achieving its proposed goals GM plans to drop 25 percent of its engineers developing non-vehicle projects.