New Venture gear factory gives new meaning to the term 'customer driven'

EAST SYRACUSE--The New Process Gear factory here is one of the brightest spots in the Central New York manufacturing landscape these days. The factory is turning out transmissions, transaxles, and transfer cases for the auto industry around the clock, with signs pointing toward even better things to come.

The prosperity has been good for the local economy, as payroll at the plant has jumped from about 700 workers less than two years ago to more than 3,000 workers today. Its parent company, a joint venture of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp., is beaming.

The engine behind the growth of the plant is not an engine at all, but a transmission. The T-350 manual transmission that New Venture designed for the sporty new Neon by Chrysler has been a hot commodity.

Where Chrysler and New Venture expected only about 40 percent of the buyers of new Neons to select the manual transmission, it was praised so highly in the automotive press and impressed drivers enough on test drives that 60 percent of the buyers are opting for the manual transmission. Richard Mizon, director of forward engineering at the plant, believes that the success of the T-350 is just an example of the increasing interest among drivers in refinements of manual transmissions.

That has meant rapid expansion at the plant. Fueled by the success of the Neon effort, New Venture is making a major investment in a new engineering and product-development facility at the New Process Gear site.

While the success has been visible in Syracuse for about the last 18 months, James L. Lanzon, New Venture's vice president for engineering, says the roots of success were planted about five years ago, shortly after creation of the company.

"We had developed a mission statement for the company when it was just beginning, but then we decided that we needed a mission statement for product engineering. That mission statement is driven by the expectations of our customers--both internal and external," Lanzon says.

Those mission statements are the working principle behind everything that New Venture Gear and the product-engineering departments do, according to Lanzon. The company, made up of the former General Motors' Muncie Transmission Division and the former Chrysler New Process Gear Division, focused on training.

The bulk of that training, Lanzon adds, was dedicated to communications and change. "We developed training for all of our people on changing roles within the organization, managing change, and customer focus," Lanzon reports. "And we began working at the outset at developing new ways of doing things--of knocking down walls and barriers between departments and functions that had been built over the years."

Part of that effort was creation of project teams that included representatives of all areas involved in bringing a product to market--forward engineering, manufacturing process, supplier management, and the final customer, according to Lanzon. In the case of the Neon, however, things went a step further. Two New Venture engineers went in-house at Chrysler to work with the team developing the car.

"We are very conscious that the transmission or transaxle is part of a system," says Mizon. "Everything has to fit together and function as one, and the earlier you bring the people working on different pieces of the system into the project, the better the final product should be."

That is somewhat different thinking from what customers might have heard a few years ago, according to Lanzon. "We have worked to get away from the traditional ways of doing thins and the ways engineers have tended to think in the past--'I'm an engineer. I'm the smartest guy on the block, and I am going to do it my way,'" Lanzon explains.

Of course, being the smartest guy on the block didn't always mean that engineers had the best understanding of the process of creation, Lanzon adds, so the company added that piece to its training program.

"Richard Socin, who is retired from the Syracuse operation, developed a curriculum for us on how to develop a New Venture Gear product. People go to school to become engineers, but they don't really teach you how to develop a product," Lanzon observes.

Lanzon describes Socin's curriculum as a combination of best-practices and a master's-degree program. "We put all of our engineers and designers through it," he adds. "It has really helped get people up the learning curve a lot faster."

All of his change has meant moving away from the way New Venture's predecessors operated when they were part of their parent companies. "There was really no advanced engineering activity. We just kind of waited for somebody to come in and tell us what they needed, and then we would go to work. It was very reactive," Lanzon explains.

Now the company, through Mizon's department, is working to get out ahead of its customers. The aim is to come up with new designs and technologies in anticipation of what the customers and drivers are going to be looking for in the years to come. A few things are easy to predict, according to Mizon.