Paper Nummi

IAM |

NUMMI Case |

Assignment Answers |

|

Arnold Nitin |

F12075 |

|

1. Summarizing the experience.

About the recruitment system.

Training and orientation.

Employee Management relationship.

Total teams effort to achieve high quality.

Peer pressure to adhere to the policies of the company.

Quality improvement.

No supervision.

Freedom to alter designs.

Importance to line workers.

2. What was it that really drove the NUMMI system?

As the case suggests it could be because of taking back the original layoff from the old plant. But this forms a small part of NUMMI’s success. Because, of the total employees only a part were from the old plant and therefore the new employees did not have the same motivation as the others. Also none of the new employees were also laid off.

It is not the technology or the worker’s ability also as GM spent nearly $70 billion whereas NUMMI spent only $1.5 billion and still achieved 60% more efficiency than GM.

The reason was the hidden values of the entire workforce which was trust, respect and continuous improvement within the plant and consistently applying all these in the system.

The consistency in selecting candidates, training, rewarding, information sharing and labor relationship was the reason for NUMMI to sustain its performance.

3. How would you transfer this learning’s to other organizations?

What NUMMI did could be straight forward but not easy to adopt directly. The values were followed in NUMMI because of their underlying principle of having management employee relationship. A management must realize that people want to contribute to the growth of the company. Unlike GM where people thought workers will not bother NUMMI’s Job Design System to improve quality by redesigning is a best example.

Job security to the employees for them to have a common goal as that of the organization.

Instead of narrowing a job profile for a worker and making him do a mundane job every day the organization can adopt job rotations and,...