Word: chryslers
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...crowning touch, Chrysler last week began selling its long-awaited LH models, a new line of midsize sedans: the Chrysler Concorde, Dodge Intrepid and Eagle Vision ($16,000 to $22,000). The cars feature an innovative "cab- forward" design to allow more passenger room and window area. Highly praised by auto experts, the new cars are expected to be worthy rivals to such popular models as the Ford Taurus, Honda Accord and Toyota Camry. All told, "Chrysler is the hottest company in the car business," declares David E. Davis Jr., editor of Automobile magazine...
...Chrysler's second success story bodes well for its incoming management. The first comeback belonged almost exclusively to Chrysler's self-touting legend, Iacocca, who towed the company out of the wilderness in the early 1980s. The second was much more the victory of a management team that learned painful lessons and persevered through fierce internal clashes. In late 1987, Chrysler was slipping again, and Iacocca began to recognize the problems, including the overly autocratic force of his own leadership. He instigated what has since become known as Truth Week, during which the company's top 500 executives went...
Even more surprising was Iacocca's admission that in spite of all his public Japan-bashing, Japan was in fact building superior cars. After the retreat, Chrysler assembled a team of 25 young recruits to spend a year at Honda's plant in Marysville, Ohio, to study everything from its assembly methods to corporate culture, which the Japanese company allowed as a political courtesy. No senior executives went along on the mission. "We wanted open minds not poisoned by Detroit," admits Iacocca. Their report, still secret, led to a greater emphasis on customer satisfaction, an increase in continual training...
Those changes became a matter of necessity because Chrysler was preparing to eliminate 23,000 salaried and hourly jobs, fully 25% of its work force. That meant not only streamlining its bureaucratic structure and reducing layers of supervisers, but also ending the turf wars between separate divisions, especially design and engineering. Iacocca himself agreed to surrender some of the chairman's prerogatives, including military-style reviews on the design floor in which he had been able to issue imperial orders for a new grill design or a new fender curve...
Rather than simply demanding that their key suppliers cut costs overnight, as GM is now doing, Chrysler enlisted supplier support to make design and engineering changes that would add value and boost productivity. As a result, Chrysler's parts suppliers have turned in 3,900 suggestions that have saved the company an estimated $156 million in production costs...