SOON - bad news and good news
Of course we had lost a lot of our Ford business due to the unfortunate actions of my boss at SU-Butec. Chrysler had closed Lynwood, the Avenger plant. We had lost the axle tube business. Significant loss of sales occurred as a result.
In the two years of the run up to the buyout, much of this turnover had been replaced by winning two large chunks of business.
Land Rover 88" and 109" chassis side members.
These were the main longitudinal chassis frame members of the classic Land Rover. The 88" was the more complex from a manufacturing point of view (for us). The square box section was joined together at the corners via a continuous arc welding process, using a pair of travelling carriages along a length of 22 feet on each side. These were specially adapted fusion arcs, usually employed in welding heavy plate in the ship building industry. The ultra violet light given off was tremendous!
The operators were forced to wear full head to toe protection to avoid sunburn. We later discovered the supplier of the Formulae One balaclava fire protection headgear. Much better for the operators. The power consumption of these two machines alone, took one third of the power on our South site.
Luckily they were not 'dirty electric loads' (sudden spikes of demand e.g. resistance welding) and with new installed 750KVA transformer capacity, we could accommodate the loads. Thereafter, for both chassis members, our task was to weld on all the side/out-rigger brackets excepting the main cross members. The combination of losing the axles tubes/the solid centre clutch plate and the build of the No.4 extension in 1979, gave us the space to accommodate the chassis members. The contract was short term. Just 12-24 months. Land Rover needed to remove the 88/109 production facilities from their Garrison Lane factory in Birmingham, to install the new 90" and 110" chassis side frame facilities. We were to take out the decades-old facilities and re-install in Rearsby.
I visited Garrison Street. It was a former rope factory. Long and narrow, trapped by a road on one side and a railway on the other. I could immediately see productivity was dire. More leisure at work than working at work, demonstrating lack of control and disciplines. Had I been running Land Rover, besides sorting this aspect out, regaining control and output/man, I would have installed the new 90/110 lines in the empty SD1 factory adjacent to the Land Rover production lines in Solihull. Output per man we calculated at eight chassis members per man per day (8/man/day).
Poor. I determined not to send any production workers from Rearsby to learn the job there. They would pick up more bad work practices than good. I sent Geoff Pettit our IE manager in to ‘measure’ the work content. He reported his equivalent Garrison Street IE department colleagues had measured the job at 11/man/day. Achievement 7-8/man/day. He thought he would measure it at 12/man/day in the Rearsby environment on a Measured Daywork system.
BL pushed a hard bargain on price. I stood next to Don as he was negotiating on the phone after weeks of going back and forth. The labour cost agreed for the 109 was £9 and 88 £11ish. Marginal indeed. However, Don persuaded them in dealing with us at arm's length. (In spite of being owned then by BL, which is how we always worked. No favours.)
That is, Land Rover sell us made-in parts and we deal directly with Thompson - their main large pressing/chassis supplier and negotiated a 10% material handling fee. This made the short-term job profitable. We took it on.
Much to the consternation of Land Rover, I steadfastly refused to send any hourly Rearsby personnel to Garrison Street. We successfully took out the facilities in a planned, ordered and controlled manner. Maintaining Land Rover production without hitch. And yes, 12/man/day was achieved and maintained.
Once we were independent, we returned to piecework. I was walking the line when I saw Tyrone Heskey (father to a number of hungry piranhas to feed at home, one of whom was Emile, later to famously play soccer for England and in the Premier League), rushing with a 109 chassis member under each arm! I beckoned him to stop, "Tyrone piecework has made you a lot stronger! On Measured Daywork it took two of you to lift one chassis member!" He didn't pause, shouting "Can't stop, got them piranhas to feed." On the piecework system, the team achieved 16/man/day. I am a great believer in controlled productivity incentive schemes.
The other aspect in my mind when taking on this ‘short term job’ was BL continually and spectacularly failed to meet new vehicle launch dates by months, years even. There was a good chance the job would last over two years. In that event I was right. It lasted four years! Great job.
But…in early 1982 Mike Hodgekinson, MD of Land Rover, began a dispute with BL Cars, of which Rearsby was part. Over the fact it had received the consideration for the sale of Rearsby. Again further ‘corporate mischief making’ of the lowest kind. On the one hand, Hodgekinson wanted price reductions from us to compensate or threatened to resource Land Rover parts from Rearsby.
Arthur Heins, Purchase Director of BL Cars was dragged into the debate and fought the BL Car side, with newly independent Rearsby as piggy in the middle. There were threats and counter-threats between the two. I weathered the storm. It was their problem not mine. Hodgekinson was simply what I term a Corporate Man, with whom I had little respect. What were his choices? Take back the 88” and 109” chassis members, a job on run-out and with nowhere to locate and no supplier willing to take it on, unless Hodgekinson bribed them with money? It was money in this case, ‘wooden dollars’ he sought. I had learned for certain over the years, ‘Corporates’ seek low hanging fruit (easy quick gains) and OEM Buyers don't seek out hard work for themselves. They avoid resourcing especially if initiated by themselves. If things go wrong (and they do), their own production heavy-hitters aren't slow in apportioning blame and loudly. This was a case of keeping our heads down and the dispute would whither, having been overtaken by an unseen BL crisis looming round the proverbial corner. And so it came to pass.
John Z DeLorean!
In the late 70s, Jaguar was in trouble. Poor quality and reliability was badly impacting sales, as was the rise of BMW as a producer of sporting, high performance saloons. Volumes were down. Along comes a ‘new kid on the block’, John Z DeLorean, American motor executive of note. He had written a best-selling book on his time with General Motors, “On a clear day you can see General Motors”. He had a concept for a stainless steel bodied sports car and the reputation of a high-flying doer. He persuaded the UK government to provide factories and other incentives to build his car in Northern Ireland. I thought he was a smooth-talking ‘wide-boy’ a Flash Harry, but I also thought he might just succeed!
He recruited buyers from Reliant Cars and set about sourcing his components. The design wasn't completed and so Rearsby, with our in-house design and development capabilities was an ideal fit. We won the pedal box, handbrake and suspension links. Production rose steadily, especially at the urging of the Northern Ireland Office/Dti to achieve his recruitment targets. In 1981 he was on a roll. I recall noting around that time, Jaguar weekly production was a lowly 280/week, whilst DeLorean was achieving 420/440 cars a week. A success? It was during this period October 1981 I was preoccupied with the MBO negotiations. One great skill I had, as Jeff Armitage (a later Manufacturing Director at Rearsby) observed, was to spot a 1-degree tilt in Rearsby performance, well before anyone else. But in late 1981, pre-occupied, I took my eye off the Rearsby ball.
One month after the MBO, in February 1982, DeLorean crashed and ceased trading. A real blow in our first month. He was building cars but not selling them. He ran out of cash. He took us for half a million pounds. An eye-watering total. Frank, Don and I had taken our eyes off the DeLorean Debtors, rising through November and December as we sought funding and fought the abominable no-men in BL Corporate Finance. We thought we were done for! Then it dawned upon us, the majority of debtors occurred during the BL ownership and 70% of it was theirs. You need a little luck sometimes. Nevertheless, we had to find £100k plus at the most sensitive time for the MBO. Later in 1982, John Z DeLorean was arrested in a hotel room attempting to buy and sell Class A drugs, in a vain attempt to raise much needed cash to keep DeLorean solvent. He wasn't just a wide-boy; he was a potential crook. He was eventually acquitted, (successfully arguing police entrapment), with his reputation in shreds.