Word: ordering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...company was focused on the ground: it gradually began offering more and more components to the auto industry, from visor brackets to complete roof systems. As the order books bulged, so did Stronach's paycheck--by 1987 he had become Canada's highest-paid executive. Around that time, Magna's engineers developed the Torrero from the company's components inventory to drive home a point: it's not the parts that matter; it's how they fit together that counts. Dennis Blommers, a plant manager for Magna's Decoma division, which specializes in exterior systems, has been along for much...
That was only the start. Suppliers began making complete prefabricated front ends, back ends and middles of vehicles, and automakers began outsourcing the entire design, development and manufacture of certain car models like the Lincoln Navigator. The results of this shift can be seen in Magna's order book. Although European and American auto production inched up only slightly during fiscal 1998, the company's sales topped $6 billion--a 19% jump over 1997. "Systems suppliers are getting a bigger piece of the pie," says Anders Franzen, vice president for strategic sourcing at Sweden's Volvo, which...
Outsourcing of entire systems does more than save money. It gives customers unprecedented freedom of choice. "The new S80 is built 100% to customer order, and virtually every car is different," says Volvo's Franzen, who credits systems suppliers, and their willingness to provide finished modules in sequence, with making that practicable. "Just think of something as simple as door panels," says Franzen. "There are four to five basic colors per car line, plus various internal surfaces such as textile, leather or wood trim, and then there are electric and mechanical mirrors. For just one car model, 3,000 variants...
...chopping happens close to home, which reduces outsourcing costs and keeps jobs nearby. Volvo, based in Goteborg, Sweden, has turned an old shipyard in the nearby town of Arendal into a supplier village, where nine supplier partners construct components and subsystems and line them up in the proper order before shipping them to the assembly plant. It all happens in double-quick time. "We give them eight days' notice to get the quantities together, and then we give them four hours' notice to do the sequencing," Franzen says...
...parallels with the impeachment 131 years ago of Andrew Johnson. Each President was vulnerable: Johnson because of wretched public actions, Clinton because of wretched private ones. In each case the Senate, after due deliberation, refused to lower the bar to conviction--a bar raised high by the framers in order to confine impeachment to "great and dangerous offenses" and "attempts to subvert the Constitution." In each case the Senate thereby saved the constitutional separation of powers by declining to make impeachment so easy that, as James Madison had warned at the Constitutional Convention, the presidential term would be "equivalent...