Word: designers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...then by building foreign plants. In both cases it employs a unique production system that cuts costs through continuous improvement, yielding sharp reductions in product development and manufacturing lead times. The cornerstone of the system involves a "platform team" approach that unites managers in such disparate areas as engineering, design, purchasing and field service and even provides suppliers to shepherd a vehicle from blueprints into the customer's hands in 2 1/2 years instead of the typical four to six years most car manufacturers take...
...sounds, given the stylistic differences between Mercedes and Chryslers, one half of the company can help the other half design cars. For example, it's no secret that Mercedes badly wants a minivan for Europe. Chrysler, with 15 years' expertise in that market, could co-design a platform for a luxurious minivan that its partner could sell in Europe, saving money and adding sales. "They had a minivan going that they won't do now," says Eaton. That is only one of many planned savings, he says, "but we don't want to talk about our product plans right...
Getting new cars out the door in a hurry into hot market niches is one of Chrysler's strengths. It comes from the company's design-driven managers, and from the company's inordinate reliance on outside suppliers. Mercedes engineers everything but the screws from the ground up, one reason it took years to develop its M-Class sport utility vehicle. Scrappy Chrysler could teach it how to develop and roll out in a more timely fashion a superluxurious SUV to compete against the popular Lincoln Navigator...
Apple's style-conscious designers spent weeks refining everything from the color (they call it Bondi blue, after an Australian beach) to the size of the translucent baffles on the front (they wanted to give it the illusion of depth but not be too transparent). They even consulted an expert in candy making to learn how to reliably reproduce its tricky color on production lines. If the final result strikes some users as looking more like a beach toy than a computer, that's just fine with design chief Jonathan Ive. "Steve said, 'Don't make it look like...
DIED. J. GORDON LIPPINCOTT, 89, avatar of corporate-logo design; in North Haven, Conn. An engineer by training, his firm's handiwork paired the spoon with Betty Crocker, a winged Mercury with FTD florists and Campbell's soup with its venerable red-and-white...