The Death Of Diesel

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

No, not Vin; he is the picture of health. But, OTR truck cabs could be seeing their last days.  Supply Chain Management Review's  5/6/2017 issue contains a heartfelt hymn to trust by intrepid Bob Trebilcock.  Directionally, the piece shows that way to go home, to get where we're going.

The extensive article describing trust at General Motors is, sadly, off-target and just plain wrong in its predictors.  To summarize, The Chevy Bolt was lauded as Car of the Year in 2016.  Of course, GM is in the middle of a 3/4 million truck recall for emisions fraud, while VW languishes in $multi-billion settlements that threaten to sink the Graf Spee.  Between the two, these could signal the last gasp of consumer-level diesel in the US.

Some gains were made, at the expense of suppliers, with GM moving up to the ranks of "average", a position not held for some twenty years.  Innovation and strategies were credited with the gains.  Ourchasing suffered with a new hand at the wheel, with claimed "savings" of over $1 billion in a year, attributed to a shift from cost cutting to cost sharing.  One might wish to validate the supplier base view of these "gains".

Reported gains savaged the supplier base, with GM staking out a claim to last place, and reneged contracts, plus quality and performance demands.  The strategic move was to create SSE, Strategic Supplier Engagement, enabled by Global Purchaing and Supply Chain (GPSC).

One set of outcomes was a new set of transparent metrics and scoresheets.  Input was taken from suppliers, and suppliers were set up to give 360% feedback.

Some think that the suppliers get a payback for building the new relationship documents.  Once again, I'd be inclined to ask the supplier base - unfiltered.

Hey, cut flowers from Colombia are still only cut flowers.  And, a matrix is only a name for a film.  Collaborate away, and hang on to those increasingly rare diesels.

 

Cheaters Can Win; They Seldom Prosper

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

Nuns, recalling another day and age, whacked Volkswagen with rulers to impose discipline and order.  VW took the pain stoically.  And, there was definitely pain.  

No rulers, just pain.  In the US alone, depending on model, and affected agency, fines ranged from $1.5 billion to over $20 billion.  European fines and recalls totalled more.

Planet-wide, and in the US, selling models were limited to lower margin, lower incentive vehicles, with reduced availability.  The nuns had struck - with ferocity - and VW continues to pay a price, even today.

The customer come-ons, are mere shadows of what is in the market from competitors, and trucks and SUVs abound as Ford, for example, promotes an entire line-up of vehicles. 

The nuns have other targets, as it has now been discovered that General Motors has been cheating on diesel emissions among its truck line, with some half dozen entrants in the "my software can fool your software" derby.

As if GM didn't have enough problems already, with shrinking market share, dwindling profits, and behind the times model choices.  Now, it turns out they have been fudging the emission numbers.

Good luck, GM.

Here come the nuns.

 

Invention Is The Mother of Facts

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

The late and loved Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan is celebrated as the imputed author of "Every one is entitled to his own set of ideas; no one is entitled to his own set of facts".

Today, we live in a cosmosphere of strongly-held opinions and ideas, some based on nothing at all, some based on what are presented to us as "alternative facts".  When are we given these revelations?  When our ideas are egregious mismatches with observable facts.

So much for political commentary; so much for current and over-heated feelings and positions.  Whither rational discourse; whither the facts that can be interpreted in the development of thoughtful ideas?

How do these affect supply chain management?  Answer; they'd better not.  We can, apparently, afford opinions in extremis and false facts, along with prominently characterized "fake" news.

But, our work decisions and our customer handling must be made based on reality - reality in facts and reality in their conclusions.  

Anything less is a dis-service, both internally and externally - and we can't afford notions and random "facts".

The Gate Is Rusting Off Its Hinges

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

A local practitioner has become unhinged, passionately believing that the 20th century holds all the answers needed for the 21st.

His singular focus set has deteriorated into the terminal stages, in which all about him are accosted with evidence that the paradigms of another age are solutions to the pressing solutions for tomorrow.

And, anyone who won't provide the deluded with a job obviously doesn't get it, fails to see the relevance of solutions that no longer solve any real and current problems.

Ultimately, I/We have had to send him away.  His ignorance turns aside rational positions, and he has become annoying on a good day, and a pain in the nether regions on a bad one.

Unfortunately, the gate is sufficiently unhinged to repair; it holds only scrap value.  And, this is the future of tomorrow's practitioner, over-experienced and under-water.

Car Men; Cash Men; Con Men

Please enjoy the thoughts and musings of our friend, supporter, and long-time contributor Art van Bodegraven Jr., who passed away on June 18, 2017. Art was a prolific writer and had amassed a collection of unpublished blog posts he had planned to run well into the future. To honor his memory, we will continue to post these remaining blogs as he had intended. If you’ve been a fan of The Art of Art blog, check out our tribute.

 

The battlefields of commerce are strewn with the maimed - and dead, casualties of the flagship of American business, and (mostly) failed losses to Japanese and Korean conquerors.

What became of American industrial might once sprung from workshops and shade trees.  It formed the bedrock of a prospering middle class, enduring legacies, in addition to ancillary services and activities.

Along the way, we discovered that the automobile universe was comprised of diverse elements.  Some were tinkerers, some were inventors, some were cut/fit/trim improvers of the tried and true technology.  Some were designers, some were all about performance on the street and on the track.

These were the car guys, the steamers, the streamliners, the suspension and carburation gurus.  A few escalated their visions with building great factories among us.These were the Dodge boys, Elwood Haynes, the pride of Kokomo, Pininfarina, Ferrari, Daimler, Ransom Olds, Henry Ford, and the like.

Some depended on educators and managers to bail out a company's finances: Alfred Sloan and  Studebaker come to mind.  Still others combined many elements, Lee Iacoccca being a prime example.

Others were tougher to psychoanalyze, with futuristic, if un-needed, technology, bringing us "tomorrow's car " today, built and delivered in three months or so.  Edsel, the infamous Tucker, Maclaren.  Were they failures, useless cons, or genuine new-century concepts?  Where do/did their promoters fall in the pantheon of wanna-be car guys?

Given that Tucker may or may not have been a fraud and a con, most of those getting rich were those pioneering newer selling approaches: Fred Ricart; Jim Moran, the Courtesy Man; franchise bundlers; zero down, unconventional trade-ins; various products from Earl "Madman" Muntz; and the ill-fated DeLorean (made in Ireland until its demise).