Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 26, 1992 TAG: 9201270173
SECTION: NEW RIVER VALLEY ECONOMY PAGE: 2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Long
VOLVO GM SENDS CALL: COME ON BACK
It may not be up there with winning the lottery, but for a laid-off Volvo worker a telephone call from Bruce Jennings comes close.Jennings, human resources supervisor at Volvo GM Heavy Truck Corp.'s plant, has been calling people back to work.
In the New River Valley, where plant closings and layoffs have dominated the news in the past couple of years, that is the best kind of call people could get. It also is good news for the valley, where Volvo is one of the higher-paying employers - with average hourly pay of $14.50.
Fifty employees will be back at work this week when the plant raises its production of heavy-duty trucks by six a day to 42.
Since June, 50 to 60 other employees have come back 15 to 20 at a time. On Dec. 6, still another 19 were recalled. And the latest recall this month will bring employment up to 1,100.
One of them was Douglas Martin, who had kept in touch with people at the plant and hoped that maybe he would get a call to come back in March or thereabouts.
But in December, he said, "it was pretty unexpected. . . . I thought it was a great Christmas present!"
It was particularly timely because he and his wife, Katherine, had a baby, Rebecca, on Dec. 2. Katherine Martin is a teacher and it appeared that she was going to have to return to work as soon as possible. Now, however, "it gave us a chance for my wife to stay home a little bit longer," he said.
Even with the recalls, employment is still short of the plant's peak employment of more than 1,300 around mid-1990.
At first, the plant announced that production would be cut from 60 vehicles a day to 42 and that it would lay off 350 workers. The layoff was later reduced to 270, quickly followed at the end of 1990 by another announcement: 120 more employees would be gone a month after Christmas and production would drop to 36 units a day.
At least this year is starting off in the other direction.
The decision to start recalling employees was not made lightly. Instead, there were days of overtime to fill extra orders. Management did not want to jerk its laid-off employees back to an uncertain future.
"We are not in the business of making yo-yos out of our people's lives," said W. Frank Adams, who became the Dublin plant's new manager March 18. Rather, the goal was to create as stable a working environment as possible.
"We beat it to death in our staff meetings . . . because we don't want to be an irresponsible employer," he said. "We have pushed and tugged at this increase. I have delayed it on several occasions."
The business of producing heavy trucks does not lend itself to long-range projections.
"Our vision is extremely short," Adams said. "Typically, if we have 10 weeks worth of orders, we think we're in good shape."
Most customers want delivery in six to eight weeks. "You can't afford to stretch your customer out for more than 10 weeks."
Demand for heavy trucks is typically down in November and December, which drives first-quarter production for the next year. But a funny thing happened: For the first time in the 15 years that Adams has been with Volvo, there was an increase in demand at the end of 1991.
If there is a one-word explanation, it would be "Quality."
Repeat orders seem to have improved the end-of-year orders and justified the call-backs.
Volvo has taken an aggressive position in the market, which has remained essentially flat. To increase production, Volvo must capture more of what exists in a market with no real growth.
Volvo had about 12 percent of the market of the 92,000 heavy-duty trucks produced in 1991.
"We're bouncing around third place in North America," Adams said. "We're No. 2 in the world. If you look at the Volvo-Renault alliance, we're No. 1."
To save money, Volvo and Renault are sharing product-development costs for such things as engineering and retooling.
Although no more call-backs have been announced, Adams said management feels positive about the possibilities during 1992.
"If our current order-intake trend continues, we're hoping to have an additional increase within several months. We know what we have to do to be a long-term survivor in this business."
Quality had been emphasized for the last three quarters of 1991. Graphs on plant bulletin boards show how each of the many stages of assembling a truck has gone. Once a week, a finished truck is pulled off the line at random and checked for defects.
Meetings follow on correcting them.
Except for identical trucks for a fleet, practically every truck that comes off the line is made to order.
"Over-the-road drivers would require different suspensions than someone who's hauling garbage or someone who's hauling concrete," said Jennings, the human resources supervisor. "Everything is very computerized. . . . I really don't know how they did it without computers before. . . . You've got hundreds of thousands of parts that have to go in here."
Volvo management makes an effort to share information on company goals and objectives with its workers.
"Everybody here's responsible. That's the avenue we're approaching," Adams said. "And at this point I think we've made a lot of progress. . . . We have a very good atmosphere in the plant today."
The work force in the New River Valley is a big plus in the region's search for new jobs, and that is reflected at Volvo. The absentee rate is just shy of 2 percent and turnover is less than 1 percent, reflecting a work ethic that sometimes astonishes business people from other parts of the country.
"I feel like, today, we're building the best product we ever built here," Adams said. For Volvo, that is the name of the game because that is what brings customers back.
"So our quality has given us some repeat orders in the last four or five months," Adams said. "That's the only way we'll survive in the long term. . . . We live on repeat business."