Plant ranks 2nd in output

Only a Honda plant in Ohio is more productive than Lordstown.
& lt;a href=mailto:shilling@vindy.com & gt;By DON SHILLING & lt;/a & gt;
VINDICATOR BUSINESS EDITOR
Productivity at the Lordstown Assembly Plant improved 5 percent last year, pushing it up to No. 2 among subcompact car plants in North America.
"It's significant and something we're pleased with," said Brian Goebel, a General Motors spokesman.
The Harbour Report, a widely used measure of productivity that was released Wednesday, said the Lordstown plant needed an average of 23.02 labor hours per vehicle last year, compared with 24.2 hours in 2001.
That was enough of an improvement to push the plant nearly to the top of the list among subcompact plants. It was behind only Honda's plant in East Liberty, Ohio, which averaged 21.43 hours. It makes the Civic and Element.
The local plant, which makes the Chevrolet Cavalier and Pontiac Sunfire, ranked fifth last year. Three of the plants ahead of it in last year's Harbour Report either went backward or stayed the same in terms of productivity.
Great improvements
Lordstown has made large strides in productivity in recent years, including a 13 percent improvement in last year's report. In 1998, it ranked ninth among subcompact plants.
GM is spending more than $550 million to upgrade the assembly plant and adjacent fabrication plant to produce a new small-car model. Goebel declined to talk about GM's expectations for the remodeled plant. The new car is due out in the fall of 2004.
Goebel attributed last year's improvement at Lordstown and other GM plants to the implementation in recent years of the company's Global Manufacturing System, which focuses all efforts on how to help line operators build a high-quality product the first time. The system includes items such as reducing movement needed by operators to retrieve tools or parts.
Lordstown also has been producing cars with fewer workers as retirees are not replaced. It has 4,100 hourly workers, compared with 6,000 in 1998.
GM North American plants
Overall, GM's North American assembly plants averaged 24.44 hours, which was a 6 percent improvement. It had four plants in the Top 10 of the Harbour Report.
Ron Harbour, president of Harbour and Associates in Detroit, said GM is securing a stronger place in the market because of its improvements.
The report ranked only Mitsubishi, which has just one North American plant, ahead of GM. It didn't rank Honda, Nissan and Toyota this year, however, because they didn't report results from all of their plants. Their productivity was better than GM's based on the plants that were reported.
Harbour doesn't release productivity numbers for specific fabrication plants, such as one General Motors has in Lordstown. Overall, GM ranked second in the average number of pieces produced per hour, following Toyota.
& lt;a href=mailto:shilling@vindy.com & gt;shilling@vindy.com & lt;/a & gt;