February 2008—Volume 28, No. 1

Planned Maintenance Report
Thank You

by Steve Jacobs, UAW QNPM Co-Champ

On October 30th through November 1st of this year the plant went through a Quality Network Planned Maintenance Assessment for Phase III award. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone in the plant for their part in that assessment. You may not know how you helped achieve the Quality Network Planned Maintenance Phase III award, but everyone in the plant had a part to play in reaching this goal. You may not know what Quality Network Planned Maintenance (QNPM) is but, every time that something went wrong on the production line, a tradesman completed a PM, a Production team leader contacted a Maintenance team leader about an emergency break down or you cleaned your work area, you were following a procedure that was put in place by QNPM Teams.

QNPM has 12 elements and 66 key features. Oh! You may ask what an element or a key feature is. An element is a subject matter such as Communication, People involvement or Housekeeping. Each of these elements has key features which are sub-titles or standards that are set for these elements. Lets take Communications, that element ask how this plant communicates in different areas, such as shift to shift, production to production, production to maintenance and maintenance to maintenance . It asks in what manner we communicate, such as with bulletin boards, telephones, radios and mouth to mouth. QNPM has three teams that are made up of cross functional employees (hourly and salary). These teams are assigned four elements each to document how this plant operates in each of these elements and see how the plant can improve in these areas. The teams grade themselves on each of the key features (1-3) depending on how much of the plant has implemented each key feature.

Every plant in General Motors has QNPM, this plant is not unique. What was unique about our plant is that we were the last assembly plant to achieve this goal. Every Plant was supposed to be at Phase III status by the end of this last UAW/GM Contract. We would have reached this goal but the assessment date was changed three times, by no fault of our own. You may ask how Phase III will help this plant. It will help it in many ways. Just like ISO, it will not help sale trucks, but what it will do is show the powers to be that we have processes and goals in place, and we grade ourselves on those processes and goals. We work very hard at trying to work jointly in achieving those goals. That goes a long way when a new product is being decided and where to build it.

Do I think that this plant did a perfect job in all of the areas of the phase III assessment? No! I do not, but I think we have a lot of good things going on in Shreveport in the area of QNPM and the assessors stated that in the wrap up meeting 11/1/2007. In their words, we are touching on World Class in some of the areas of QNPM. Scoring 1457 points and needing only 1450. We are expected to improve on that score over the next 2 years. That is when they will come back for a recertification. A perfect score would be 1500 points, but no plant has every scored a perfect score and I doubt that there every will be.

There will be an official QNPM Phase III award presentation at a later date, which will be a plant wide affair. I foresee a huge celebration. It is a big deal and everyone should be congratulated on a job well done.