Faces of GM

Steve: GM Blue Meets Air Force Blue

May 3, 2010 at 2:51 pm

Steve Harrison: GM senior manufacturing engineer and retired US Air Force Master Sergeant
It was an obvious connection, at an opportune time.  I work on a team of maintenance folks from many areas within General Motors – pipefitters, truck repairers, electro-mechanical operators and more. You can’t build great cars and trucks if you don’t have excellent maintenance procedures and people to keep the equipment and machinery in top shape, and that’s what my team does.

Recently, we were traveling to an IBM software conference in Nevada, which was focusing on GM’s maintenance management software of choice, MAXIMO. MAXIMO helps prevent problems before they happen, which is always our goal.

Just north of the conference is Nellis Air Force Base. They have a team of maintenance folks, much like ours… in areas like hydraulics, equipment repair, electro-mechanical, avionics, jet engine and more. And we had connections.

As a retired member of the Air Force, I contacted the Nellis public affairs office before the conference, to set up a collaborative meeting with the ‘Ambassadors in Blue,’ the United States Air Force Aerial Demonstration Squadron, The Thunderbirds.

One reason for our visit was to give our UAW-GM team another perspective on what standardized work looks like. We know that preventive maintenance results in better vehicle quality by avoiding the quality problems that arise from the stops-and-starts of machine downtime/start-up cycling, so what better opportunity is there than to learn what the best of the best are doing in this field?

During our meeting, we had a long discussion on how the supply chain operates, also known to us in GM as indirect material procurement. There were some slight variances, but overall we operate in very similar ways with spare parts and even similar ‘share the spare’ processes.

It was great to witness the expressions of both teams when we discussed common subjects of interest, such as frequency of scheduled inspections and time change repair actions. Lynne Waldron (UAW) and Wayne Tanis (UAW) explained that GM uses time based, hour meter readings and I talked about how stamping operations use stroke based maintenance to schedule tasks on presses and dies.

MSgt. Stackable nodded and smiled, stating that the US Air Force uses variations of the same scheduling tools. Jet engines are inspected generally by total run hours, however, some components of the engine are based on cycle counts; which equates to each engine start being a cycle.

Mike Bachleda (UAW) asked MSgt. Stackable, “What types of maintenance problems are entered into your maintenance management system,” and he replied: “All of them, no matter how minor the deficiencies.” That’s impressive.

On the drive back to the hotel, Mike summed it up best: “if you want to see the best of the best in maintenance, look at America’s military services, in particular the United States Air Force.”

We were also privy to recovery operations of the U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds Commander and Flight Leader.  As Lt. Col. Cunningham departed his aircraft, he stopped by and introduced himself to our group, and took the time to state the importance of having a maintenance program that is stringent, is repeatable and has integrity built in to its fabric.  Top down and bottom up commitment to maintenance excellence.

In addition, we were able to represent the UAW and GM as a joint team of maintainers to meet cream of the crop maintainers that represent the hundreds of thousands of maintainers that protect and serve this great country of ours, and the freedoms that we as fellow Americans cherish; and to say thank you.

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