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| GM Takes 'Team Work' Approach to Design of 2001 Concepts Working closely and collaboratively in multi-disciplinary teams, engineers, designers and strategists are stretching their skills to help GM speed up the product development cycle and use concept vehicles as a way to test new product ideas. “Ideas are cheap; production mistakes aren’t,” said John Taylor, a charismatic Australian architect by training who heads APEx, the Advanced Portfolio Exploration team. Five years ago, there wasn’t any real front-end process for generating concepts, Taylor said. The development of GM’s portfolio was “a momentum thing that came from planning what would be the next-generation Impala or Grand Am,” he said. “And as a result, GM took a lot of heat for having a bunch of cars that all looked pretty much the same. We had 23 mid-sized, three-box sedans. The mentality was that every brand needed to have one.” The stable of ideas held by APEx now numbers more than 400 wildly diverse vehicles and it grows every week. Each year, a few dozen conceptual ideas are selected for further exploration, and of that, only a handful will actually make it to show cars. But as the team assesses which ideas should move on to the next stage of development, very few ideas are actually discarded, noted Bill Ochalek, a manager in APEx. They’re kept around as fully formed studies should the market conditions ever emerge that might be right for them. This will speed GM’s response to market forces. “We would only discard an idea when its time is clearly past,” Ochalek said. Similarly, a new team of “designing engineers” in the Portfolio Development Center may work through the first stages of engineering on 30 or 40 vehicle concepts each year, knowing full well that only seven or eight of them will actually become show cars. Since GM is approaching concepts as more serious candidates for production, this sort of up-front engineering ensures that everyone’s visions are realistic. And some concepts, frankly, are discontinued because the engineering just can’t be made to work. But again, nothing is discarded; they just shelve the idea until something they call “unobtanium” can be developed. The goal of both of these teams is to develop ideas that can be brought to market quickly and fully formed to better respond to shifting market needs. Engineers are having to think more like designers, and designers more like market analysts, and analysts more like engineers. There’s an effort, Ochalek said, “to find a common language so that everyone can communicate about the car.” This blending of skills is going to make GM smarter and faster, said Ron Edwards, powertrain and front compartment leader in the Portfolio Development Center. “If the engineers had their way, every vehicle would be ugly and functional. And if designers had their way, every vehicle would be gorgeous, but probably non-functional. We’re trying to meet in the middle somewhere.” Engineering concepts up front not only brings them to market sooner, it also results in show cars that are more functional and drivable, which gives company leaders and the automotive press a better chance to assess their promise. Like any uncharted territory, these new approaches to developing vehicles can be a little nerve-wracking at times, said Janet Goings, a portfolio concepts manager who has spearheaded an ad hoc group which explored the youth market. “It’s been exciting, frustrating, every emotion you can name,” Goings said. The innovative Smart Youth Strategies team, or iSYS, came together spontaneously as people in several different departments, many of them quite young themselves, saw the need for GM to better understand and reach out to younger buyers. The iSYS team includes designers, market analysts and strategists who pored over every marketing study they could to develop a fully formed picture of who the next car buyers will be and what they want. Though it came together almost informally, the iSYS group has been able to share its findings with design, engineering, marketing and leadership teams throughout the company. “Youth focus is really about keeping the company healthy and prospering,” Goings said. “GM has to go after women, and a more diverse and educated consumer. It needs to branch out.” This gets back to what John Taylor calls “Smart Up Front:” the ability to know and respond to the customer before putting pen to sketch pad. Looking ahead, the APEx model of generating scores of ideas and then matching the best ones with proven market segments is an effort that will spread throughout GM’s culture and its global operations, Taylor believes. It won’t be a special skunk-works, it’ll just be GM. |
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