Just now that the equal merger between FCA and PSA is about to generate a new global auto giant, it comes out Future factory, the book written by Marco Bentivogli, secretary general of Fim Cisl, and Diodato Pirone, journalist of Il Messaggero, a great expert on industrial policy. The book - publisher Egea (Bocconi) - will be released on November 7 and FIRSTonline publishes below a preview useful for understanding the FCA case in a strategic moment for its growth, starting with the miracle of Pomigliano.
Future factory it is in fact the first book to tell the story of the Fiat-Fca case and it does so from the point of view of factory work. It is a journey into modern factories, a crossroads of the great transformation of work and production, factories where, contrary to common wisdom, fatigue decreases but the stress of workers 4.0 increases, called to work not only with their hands but also with their brains. A technological and cultural revolution, the result of a new vision of the company and the courage of a part of the union, thanks to which today FCA merges on a par with PSA and indeed, in some sectors, the survival. Here is the chapter on the transformation of Pomigliano.
Developer message from the crooked factory
Sergio Marchionne was spared nothing that day. It was December 13, 2011, Saint Lucia. With a press conference at the factory, the Pomigliano plant was reopened, from which not a pin had come out since the end of 2007. That day was a watershed. He marked the birth of the new Italian Mirafiori. Fiat was once again speaking to the country from a factory. As he had done in 1923 with the revolutionary architecture of the Lingotto, in 39 with the endless Mirafiori destined to produce an economic miracle, in 72 with the inauguration of six factories in the South to stop emigration and in 93 with the «integrated factory» of Melfi which had to respond to the Japanese invasion and the excessive German power. That December 13, far from the rows of machinery in Pomigliano still smelling new, the spread flew to 575, the recession was biting, the newspapers were a puzzle of cuts and taxes. But that day Marchionne intended to launch a developmental message from the heart of the rudest South. "Look around you," he told a couple of hundred reporters in the middle of a hall overlooking the assembly lines. "Fiat will find the capital to make cars without state aid, but we don't want obstacles to production." He didn't convince anyone. The question of a France Presse journalist was a razor sharp one: "You've put a few workers back to work in the old factory, don't you feel like a traitor?" The reply was not up to par: "We will take those who will be needed". Curtain.
The Transalpine reporter could not have known that, sitting on the stool next to Sergio Marchionne's, was a brilliant and very tall German-Brazilian engineer, Stefan Ketter, then head of manufacturing, ie of all the Fiat factories. A couple of years earlier something very similar to an arm wrestling had taken place between him and Marchionne. Marchionne wanted to keep the Pomigliano plant open at the cost of bringing that little Panda jewel back home from Poland. Ketter's team, but also a large part of the Lingotto management team, were very perplexed.
At the time, in Pomigliano the Alfasud curse was still alive (it was the name of the plant at the time of its foundation by the state-owned Alfa Romeo, at the end of the 2007s) which meant micro-strikes, absenteeism, modest quality. In short, a place where work was bad. Thousands of urban legends circulated like the one about the dozen stray dogs, fed by the workers, who roamed the sheds, including the paint shop, or in a place where not a single hair should fly. Someone claimed that the people in the factory were used to eating along the assembly lines, which ended up attracting a few rats. Furthermore, the conditions of the canteen and the changing rooms left something to be desired and at each shift change there was a deluge of screams and complaints. However, in 150, the last year in which the factory had trotted, there had been as many as XNUMX episodes of micro-conflict, often for trivial reasons. A place abandoned by God and men.
Marchionne, to put the barrack back on its feet, within the framework of thethe only European operation for the return of an automotive product to the West from the East, assigned Ketter a nice nest egg of millions (800 were invested in all, including the design of the car) to rebuild it from the ground up and carte blanche on staff and managers, including employees. In the original plan there was only one way not to burn that mountain of money: to produce Pandas like crazy. That is, for six days, including Saturday, and 24/400. One piece every minute, or rather less, day and night, more or less following the rhythms already achieved in Poland. In summary, it was a question of constructing a credible plan for the return of production (back reshoring, in jargon) from abroad starting from a shocking fact: the salary of the Polish workers of the Tychy plant at the time was just over XNUMX euros per month.
Ketter did two things to turn the frog into a prince. The first was to stuff the factory with robots, creating a spectacular bodywork department where the so-called "cathedral" still stands today, i.e. a maxi-tangle of robots concentrated in a very few metres, whose orange proboscis all operate together as a group of close-knit dancers. The show takes place in the semi-darkness, because the lights are turned off to save energy, but we are talking about a show: in a nanosecond the robots sneak into the body like the fingers of a surgeon, they stretch, they turn, they weld the metal sheets amidst the roar of sparks and then they rise again in the nervous order designed by a great choreographer.
The second novelty was even more innovative because it concerned men: breaking hierarchies within the plant and rethinking the way of working to the point of rewriting the very relationship between workers and Fiat. A gigantic political-trade union battle was unleashed on this issue, fought - according to the newspapers - above all on cuts to breaks and penalties for absenteeism. But the real added value of the ad hoc contract written for Pomigliano (which later proved to be the starting point for Fiat's farewell to Confindustria) was another: Marchionne asked the unions to prevent micro-strikes, accepting fines if their delegates had been coldly called, i.e. without activating a confrontation with the company. Fim-Cisl, Uilm-Uil and Fismic accepted. The Fiom does not. A thermonuclear war ensued which obscured what really happened.
In Pomigliano, five innovations were scientifically introduced for the first time in a Fiat factory which – through the application of the World Class Manufacturing (Wcm) operating system – are now the rule in all FCA plants from the USA to China and which we are going to get to know in detail.
The first: a work organization based on teams of seven workers, coordinated (attention, coordinated, not commanded) by a team leader worker with full powers over his assembly station. Translation: since then, in FCA's Italian factories, around 1500 workers do not work with their hands but with their heads and the other FCA workers no longer depend directly on a distant manager but on a colleague with whom perhaps they go to the stadium on Sundays. Thus was born the figure of the worker who also incorporates intellectual functions and the organizational model of the flat factory. And only those who remember the regime of "religion of hierarchy" that prevailed in the old Fiat can perceive the epochal nature of the transition. Second novelty: ergonomics. All the movements of the workers were (and continue to be) designed to avoid or break up tiring tasks, speeding up the line.
Third break: first the workers only had to perform. Since that December 2011 they have been asked to propose solutions to improve productivity. Fourth: the office building was closed and the desks of the employees were placed along the assembly lines from which they are still separated today only by a crystal. The so-called "aquarium" was born. Fifth: from the factory manager to the last employee, everyone wore the exact same overalls with the aim of teaming up.
Result? One Panda every 55 seconds and average absenteeism at 1,7%. A jewel of efficiency under Vesuvius, in one of the most problematic areas in Italy. On that day of Saint Lucia all this was unthinkable. Today, however, the Pomigliano factory is so consolidated in its role as FCA labor capital that teams of its technicians are called upon to lend a hand in other factories. It recently happened in Sterling Heights, a few miles from downtown Detroit, in the gigantic 2,5-ton Ram pick-up plant, to help Americans achieve the incredible goal of assembling one every 45 seconds. Some time ago a large delegation from Volkswagen came here to study "the case". There were the production managers of the small Up! and the gigantic Q7, accompanied by some heads of unit, a work analysis manager, a plant manager and even a work methodology manager. The Germans in Naples to study the work!
However, Sergio Marchionne never found the right words to explain the Pomigliano revolution. Years later, in the soundtrack of one of those TV spots that leave their mark, entrusted to the rapper Victor, he inserted a phrase that today can sound like his answer to the France Presse journalist: «I'm the gamechanger / And I walk with danger / I don't need a flag to be revolutionary».
