The Plant: Oh! Quality Where Art Thou

The story of “The Plant, Oh! Quality Where Art Thou” begins in the summer of 1957 and it ends 52 years later in March 2009 when Tom Luggs invites his former GM colleagues to a roundtable discussion on the demise and future of General Motors Corporation. It is the story of a young man who accepts a co-op engineering education appointment with Chevrolet Division to attend General Motors Institute of Technology in Flint, Michigan. “The Plant” is a story that follows Tom’s career where he learns production is king, and production efficiency is the measure of success. He reluctantly leaves GM in 1965 and is gone for fourteen years. He returns to GM only to find that quality is still the foster child to the ‘King’; production efficiency. He spends the last decade of his industrial career working to transform GM’s myopic ‘production efficiency’ culture, with its huge gluttonous batch process systems, to a system of Just-In-Time Quality Synchronous Manufacturing, where quality is the only measure of success for sustained productivity. With America’s 2008-2009 financial freefall and the subsequent demise of GM, Tom invites his former colleagues to a roundtable discussion where they discuss GM’s situation, and put it into perspective. They explore root causes, and offer insight into what it will take for GM to be a viable company in the future. His experiences are unique. They were uniquely recorded, and they likely represent the trials and tribulations of not only himself, but many of his colleagues in the manufacturing engineering field. As a historical novel it hits at the core of GM internal politics. The story shines a light on the philosophical management issue of production efficiency versus quality. Readers will want to read this story, because it is a story about the day-to-day firing line, the people in the trench, not about the Board Room.