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| Bob Atkins (r), chief
operating officer of Workhorse Custom Chassis, former plant manager at the GM Detroit
assembly plant where motorhome chassis were manufactured, was among Workhorse chairman and
CE0 Andrew Taitz's (l) first employees after acquiring the p-chassis operation from
General Motors. |
The contract had not yet been signed and
nary a stud was in place or cement slab laid where a new plant would be constructed.
Atkins added, "Andrew had to make some tough decisions before the deal was closed. He
had to start moving dirt and start putting money in the ground."
When the deal was finally signed in early January, WCC
had about eight weeks to get the plant built and start producing product.
"Many people couldn't believe it," Atkins
continued. "'Who's Mr. Taitz kidding? He's not going to have product by March!' A lot
of nay-sayers just did not believe it was going to happen. Chassis customers were
skeptical too so they started stockpiling chassis."
Andrew Taitz was obviously a bold visionary who believed
it could be done. It's not every businessman who can walk into GM and tell them he intends
to buy its P-chassis assembly operations.
Taitz, owner of Union City Body Company (UCBC), was a
P-chassis customer and had been since he bought UCBC in 1993. UCBC serves the steP-van and
fleet delivery truck business with a customer base including companies such as United
Parcel Service (UPS), Ryder, Frito-Lay and others.
Taitz told RV News, "As a body builder I've
experienced the frustrations of having to interface with these large corporations that
have to serve niches and are not structured for that. So being a customer of GM and
realizing there is a real need to service these niches, it could be done differently.
So I approached GM about three-and-a-half years ago and
asked them to sell me the striP-chassis business because volume-wise its not even a blip
on their radar screen. These large motor companies are geared for high-volume production.
I felt that having a focused chassis company that would market directly, engineer, and
service the marketplace was a good business opportunity. It took me three years to
convince them.
"Basically no one believed we could get this plant
up and operating by the end of the first quarter of 1999. I wasn't really concerned that
we would."
Taitz smiled and added, "Many of the body companies
have told me that we would have made a lot of money if we participated in the bets against
us -- could have paid for the deal.
"My commitment to the marketplace was that they
wouldn't suffer from lack of product. It was very important to be up and running by the
end of the first quarter because it was the timing that we had outlined. We spent a lot of
time planning and putting the right team together in advance of actually picking up the
plant and moving it. We put a group of people together including employees that we were
going to hire from GM, and industrial engineers, and had this team working together
planning the whole relocation process as well as planning the layout and the new plant.
"I think the most exciting part of this for me was
to create an organization without any baggage -- all the people we hired, we hired for the
right reasons. We hired them for their attitude, their people skills and their motivation
and because they really wanted to come work for the company. We weren't required to take
anybody.
"We hired some very key people from General Motors
who were involved in manufacturing and the processes, plus we hired people from outside of
GM. We put together a really great team who really enjoy what they're doing and work well
together.
"It's a melting pot of cultures -- large corporate
cultures and entrepreneurial cultures. What some of the GM guys tell me is that they've
been given tools for 30 years and have been unable to use them. They come to a small
company and can really use the tools they've acquired.
"Its been a great experience with the whole group of
people that we've hired --close to a 100 salaried people and about 200 hourly people. The
whole atmosphere and environment in the organization is really great."
One of the first people Taitz hired was Bob Atkins.
"Yes, it was a hard decision to leave GM after 30
years," Atkins recalled, "but I recognized at GM I would never have an
opportunity like this."
Over his career Atkins has had ideas on better ways to do
things, but in a large corporate structure such as GM, selling those ideas to all levels
of management is not always easy. At Workhorse he would be able to apply that experience
from the ground up.
Atkins said, "And that's not just from a hardware
standpoint -- a nut-turner is a nut-turner -- you need certain tools to get the job done.
But from the people side of the business, what's the right way to set up an environment
where people are going to enjoy coming to work and going to be effective at doing the job?
"I believe that can be done. You can be efficient
and have a good place to work. I think the Japanese have shown a lot of people how that
can be done. And frankly GM has spent a lot of time studying these systems. I've been to
Japanese companies' plants and know what to do, but its all very difficult in an existing
environment to get those changes in place.
"So this was an opportunity to say, lets start from
the ground up and do this right. Lets treat our people right, lets train them right, and
they will respond. And that's what happened."
And while Atkins made the decision to come to work for
WCC, other key GM employees are still wrestling with the decision.
Atkins said, "It was a good time from a family
perspective for me. Our family was ready to make a move geographically. And from a
professional point of view, I was certainly ready to use the tools that I've acquired over
30 years and use them positively and productively. For others it's not been that
easy."
Even with people of the caliber of Atkins, Taitz's
commitment to be manufacturing chassis in the first quarter of 1999 was a formidable
challenge.
Taitz said, "A lot of time was spent in planning and
making sure we had the resources to deal with any contingency -- and there were
many."
According to Taitz, trying to accomplish this production
in the dead of winter presented the team with its share of challenges. Eventually, WCC
lost 24 days of construction due to weather. And with 300 trailer loads of equipment being
moved from Detroit to Union City, getting the plant built was imperative.
Union City is 225 miles southwest of Detroit, located on
the Indiana-Ohio border less than an hour drive from Dayton, OH.
Despite the weather and other challenges, the WCC team
choreographed the transition like a ballet. Construction crews worked during the day and
at 4 p.m. the Union City production crews worked into the night. Taitz said, "It was
a pretty intense experience."
Taitz is no Johnny-come-lately to the business world.
Originally from South Africa, he came to the United States in 1990. He said, "I've
been in business all my life, but not in the transportation industry. Union City Body was
my first experience in this industry. My background has been in the high tech and food
service areas.
"UCBC has been around for 101 years. I bought the
company out of bankruptcy in October 1993. UCBC manufactures commercial truck bodies and
we market the product to many of the large and small fleet companies around the country.
UPS is our largest customer. We also own a few other body companies -- one manufactures
beverage bodies and trailers and another manufactures refrigerated bodies and trailers. We
also have a refurbishment facility that rebuilds these vehicles."
By making the commitment to have product in the first
quarter of 1999, Taitz's credibility with chassis customers such as RV manufacturers was
on the line. In the meantime, Taitz was meeting with RV industry companies promising to
listen and respond to their chassis needs a refreshing departure from the years of the
unfulfilled promises from the large auto manufacturing companies.
Ironically, just as WCC was trying to get a foothold in
the RV industry, Ford, a company with more than 50 percent marketshare in gasoline-powered
chassis hinted that it planned to cut back on chassis deliveries to RV manufacturers. And
while Ford later backed off of that possibility, RV manufacturers beat a path to Union
City to ascertain on their own whether Taitz was for real or not.
And while the task of building a plant, moving in
equipment, laying out a production line, hiring and training employees was a monumental
job in the best of conditions, the WCC team pulled it off. WCC was producing chassis by
the end of February as Taitz promised.
As you can well imagine, it was not without its
challenges. Atkins recalled employee training programs being conducted with snow blowing
around everyone because the plant was without a roof. Atkins said, "I don't think the
winter was that bad on average, but we had some really bad storms, heavy storms and no
roof. It was a problem.
"We had trucks in there shoveling snow so we could
set up operations. We had some bad weather at the wrong time, but those are just war
stories now. There were days of frustrations; however, everyone took the attitude -- hey,
we're going to do it. It was almost a military mentality. We're going to take the beach,
and that's the way it is.
"Just communicating was a problem. There were no
phones in the plant so we bought cell phones. It was just little stuff that you had to
work your way through."
Atkins said the two biggest problems, however, were heat
and rest rooms, with rest rooms being the most important.
"The day we finally got indoor rest rooms,"
Atkins said, "a large cheer went up from everyone."
In May when RV News visited WCC, the 209,000-square-foot
plant, the largest striP-chassis manufacturing facility in the world, was in full
operation producing 800 chassis per month, on one shift. There is still much to be done.
For example, engineers, management and administrative teams work in a campus-type
environment in office trailers connected by a wood deck. Plans are proceeding for a new
building for these operations. In addition, the parking lots remain unpaved and the
landscaping is still to come. However, since the first priority was to get the
manufacturing plant up and running no one seems to mind these minor inconveniences.
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