Shortly after General Motors emerged from bankruptcy reorganization in summer 2009, employees at GM's Fort Wayne (Ind.) Assembly Plant not only learned that the plant would be staying open, but also that they'd be getting more work -- and soon.

As part of its restructuring, GM had decided to shutter its truck and bus assembly plant in Pontiac, Mich., and move production of heavy-duty pickup trucks from Pontiac to Fort Wayne. In September 2009, GM announced that it was adding a third shift to GM-Fort Wayne, and in early 2010 the plant beefed up for the extra shift by bringing in 900 employees from 35 GM sites in 25 states.

While the consolidation certainly was welcome news for GM-Fort Wayne, there was one daunting challenge: The plant, which opened in 1986, never had built a heavy-duty pickup truck before.

That posed a problem in the paint shop, where the carrier system is too small to accommodate an extended-cab pickup truck with an 8-foot, or "long," box (essentially the bed of the pickup truck).

"It was going to cost us tens of millions of dollars in equipment and processes in the paint shop," says plant manager Mike Glinski. "So we had to come up with a creative process."

Extended-cab pickups ordered with dual rear wheels travel through the assembly process without their boxes, which are assembled in the paint shop. It's one of several workarounds that has helped GM-Fort Wayne absorb production of heavy-duty pickups from GM's closed Pontiac, Mich., plant.

With the help of scheduling and engineering personnel at GM headquarters, the plant came up with the box-swap process.

It works like this: The plant pairs two pickups that have been ordered with the same paint color -- a regular-cab pickup with a short box and an extended-cab pickup with a long box -- and swaps their boxes so they can be painted. After the two trucks go through the paint process, the boxes are returned to their original truck cabs.

GM indicates which pickups are to be swapped when it broadcasts orders to the plant, Glinski explains.

View article on one page