In the late eighties and early nineties, Fiat also began to be fully invested in its organisational, technological and relational components by the changes deriving from the globalization of competition and was, consequently, urged to re-found its logic based up to that moment on the paradigms of mass production.
In particular, the European context in which the automotive industry operated was characterized by an ever greater competitiveness between the manufacturing companies, by the disappearance of the quotas for Japanese and Korean cars and by a market whose complexity was now determined by an ever more evolved clientele and demanding.
All the major European manufacturers had to engage in the elaboration of their own strategic evolution projects, one of the fundamental postulates of which was represented by the fact that technologically advanced products, competitive in costs and positioned on excellent quality standards, presupposed cutting-edge process technologies, application of the most sophisticated industrial logistics systems and high utilization of the plants.
Moreover, these objectives could not disregard interventions of innovation and rationalization of the production structures; reason for which, the major manufacturers found it convenient to allocate part of their production capacity outside the domestic borders on the basis of undoubted advantages in terms of financial incentives for investments, containment of labor costs, greater use of the plants and presence as builders in markets in progressive expansion, as in Spain, Portugal or in the ex-communist countries.
Fiat also evaluated at the time, given the available allocation options, the opportunity to start production of its new model, which would be the Punto, in a new factory to be located probably in Portugal, given the competitive conditions that the country offered in terms of economic and financial incentives and more than half the cost of labor.
After a close internal debate and at the trade union level, Fiat finally believed it could favor a national choice, on the assumption that it was in any case consistent with the essential objectives of competitiveness, with specific reference to the flexibility of work performance and intensive use of the plants.
Fiat was born in the south of Melfi and went into production with the Punto and Ypsilon in the first months of 1994, with an installed capacity of 1800 cars a day and with a fully operational workforce of around 7000.
Melfi became the first car factory, at least in Europe, with full use of the plants for 24 hours a day for six days a week, including Saturdays, with the work activity articulated in three structural rotation shifts with sliding rest periods based on multiweekly at individual level of two consecutive weeks of 48 hours and the third of 24 hours, thus guaranteeing the average contractual working time of 40 hours.
The maintenance of the highly automated systems was then always organized on three 8-hour structural shifts in rotation but for seven days a week, in order to also allow for extraordinary maintenance when the processes were stopped.
The increase in the installed production capacity of Melfi (about 600.000 cars/year) also led to the inevitable rationalization and reorganization of the obsolete plants in the North: in the space of a few years, the plants in Chivasso, Arese and Rivalta were decommissioned.
With the Melfi factory, which arose from a "green field", Fiat abandoned the Fordist American model of "mass production" (with which it had motorized the country) to switch to the Japanese model of "lean production", characterized by the objective of absolute conformity of the products manufactured to the wishes expressed by the market, of the total quality of the production process considered in its entirety, of the extreme flexibility and timeliness of response to market variations and technological innovations.
Fiat declined the "lean production" model in its vision of the "Integrated Factory", i.e. a socio-technical model that involved not only internal elements (organisation, production, logistics, etc.) of the company, but also external elements to it, such as social and union relations or the supplier/customer system.
In the Melfi district, for example, 18 satellite plants were built for a total workforce of about three thousand workers with the task of supplying the processing lines just in time.
One of the determining elements to enter into the logic of the new organizational model was that of mobilizing the proactivity of the workers, the abolition of the traditional division between those who think and those who execute, with the consequent waste of workers' knowledge that could not be collected or stimulated by the previous models organizational.
Another important element characterizing the logic of the Integrated Factory was the "decision-making process": the previous behaviors linked to a Taylorist work organization envisaged bringing operational problems from the bottom up along the organization's hierarchy.
In the new model, the logic is almost the opposite: problems must be solved where they originate and by those who have seen them arise and have the expertise to solve them.
Informality and hierarchical de-bureaucratization manifest themselves in particular on crucial occasions in the production process: when the worker finds an anomaly in the process that does not meet the expected quality standards, he is authorized to stop the line and turn on an alarm light on a panel called "Andon" (from the Japanese "lantern") which informs management and maintenance operators for immediate intervention.
Hence, involvement-motivation and decision-making-operational delegation were the key points of the Integrated Factory.
The implementation of the unprecedented organizational model required, initially and for a certain period, a robust work of training and communication, not only on "technological knowledge" but above all on orientation towards the work process, on methods for prevention rather than on remedial intervention, teamwork and interoperability.
In terms of corporate culture, organizational behaviour, and therefore internal training and communication, the case of Melfi at the time was different from that of all the other establishments, precisely because of its different genesis. Even before the start of production in 1994, for about two years in Turin in the then company school (ISVORFIAT) a thousand "pioneers" (managers, technologists, office workers and workers) were trained with the task of starting all the subsequent operational mechanisms of the establishment.
It was a unique experience, one of the decisive "trump cards" for the initial success of the initiative which started in a social context not conditioned by a consolidated industrial culture, which could have brought with it the temptation to repeat traditionally known schemes and behaviors and, in the past , winners.
The Melfi case was for years one of the favorite subjects of sociology and business organization literature, but over the years and the continuous growth of the workforce, the antibodies that the system had received to avoid the onset of traditional hierarchical and functional barriers.
The socio-technical system conceived at the beginning went into crisis after about ten years precisely following the gap and misunderstanding between the close-knit and motivated group of "pioneers" and the young people who subsequently entered the factory, who, after the initial enthusiasm for the workplace, did not find in the daily working activity the narration carried out by the pioneers themselves.
Thus, in April 2004, the factory was blocked for 21 days, the longest in Fiat's history after the 35 days of Mirafiori, and which went down in trade union history as the "Spring of Melfi".
In fact, the thrust of the Integrated Factory model was exhausted, but the foundations had nevertheless been laid for the development, after a few years, of World Class Manufacturing.
