IndustryWeek (7/3, Jusko) – Harley-Davidson Motor Co. delivered a presentation at the recent IndustryWeek Best Plants conference titled "Union and Management Partnerships Driving Manufacturing Excellence." Despite the title, the content would have been equally valuable for non-union workplaces. To view a video of the Harley-Davidson presentation, go online to Union and Management Partnerships Driving Manufacturing Excellence.

A few tidbits from their remarks include:

• With two exceptions, all union members are free to work at any of the union jobs, without jurisdictional boundaries.
• There are no supervisors, no team leaders and no group leaders. Key to this facility is natural work groups, of which there are 98.
• All groups have a scorecard process by which they are measured. This includes the plant leadership group all the way to the natural work groups.
• New-employee training takes eight days to complete, and it does not include hands-on experience or training about how to perform the job. Those efforts come after the eight days.
• A collaborative product development process involves engineers and union workers in new product design reviews as much as two years in advance of a product introduction.
• No information is kept secret from the unions, which has been helpful in these tough economic times. When hard decisions need to be made, "we have the same amount of data; we're looking at the same information."