Chapter 29

Work 3 - Controlled Descent   2009 to 2017

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - career, colleagues and bosses

Materials Manager (again)

So “Life at the Top’ had concluded in 2009 with me realising that I’d been the Works Director long enough and I’d be happy enough to drop down a level in the hierarchy and reacquaint myself with the nitty-gritty, hurly-burly of materials management.  The option of seeking pastures new held too many risks, not least to work-life balance and finances

It had been twelve years in the top job; a period when, thanks to the backing from our Italian owners who recognised the site’s potential and the with invaluable support of the guys in my management team, I’d managed  to keep the plant alive.  The hard facts reveal we’d increased not just output but also competitiveness, productivity, quality and safety.  I was pretty satisfied with the legacy but a big challenge still lay ahead.

At least I knew I could handle the job, but there was work to do. 

The team was unsettled: a couple of the better guys had just moved to new roles and my recent predecessors hadn’t been particularly strong on delegation or team-building.  Add to that the fact that Merloni-Indesit had finally got round to moving the Yate site onto the new SAP manufacturing system used everywhere else in the Group; absolutely key to a successful implementation would be a rapid transition by my Materials Team.  In addition to my new managerial role I ended up as the project leader on site and immersed myself in a rapid crash course to learn the nuts and bolts of the system.  Luckily, we were well supported from Italy and just about hit the go-live date.

During the training I’d had a chance to assess the individuals in the team.  They were competent but weren’t a strong group and lacked a graduate presence to invigorate the office. It took a couple of years to get where we needed to be, but the team strengthening began almost immediately as I selfishly tried to snaffle some talent and experience from elsewhere.  It helped that I carried some reputational muscle and leant on HR, persuading them my new small team needed bolstering.

In came Patrick Downey to handle the control of all new product and modification introductions and to bring his disciplined, methodical approach to rub off on the office.  Next we got our hands on dynamic fresh-faced graduate, Nick Parslow; high energy, stuffed full of ideas, he was a likeable glutton for work and we threw him all sorts of challenges.  It was an inevitable shame when he left two years later for a sales job on twice what we could afford to pay him.  Meanwhile I was working on helping Kevin Ersser build his enthusiasm in the new role of Planner.   He’d been shunted out from a production management role under Steve Sanders and had felt a bit hard done by but with an important role in the new SAP system, he now had a job to suit his character and abilities.

It was a start but we were barely ready for challenges of the new system and all the transactional differences that people across the site had to adopt.

My new boss Michele Sculco didn’t really ‘get it’ and, whilst we were always polite to each other, we never gelled.  Carlos hadn’t been given much choice in appointing my successor.  With factories closing in Italy there was surplus of senior managers looking for positions and Michele had been dropped into the UK to manage the closure of Kinmel Park.  With a year left on his ex-pat contract he moved down to Yate to temporarily fill the gap.  His background was in Design and Quality, heavy on procedures and project-plans but light on the realities of the manufacturing sharp-end, and very light on the challenges of blending a Just-in-Time supply chain with a major systems overhaul.  I bit my lip a few times when he was asking us to ‘promise’ to achieve things that contained a whole stack of variables and, being typically Italian, he was difficult to persuade to accept alternative viewpoints on subjects.  I recall one incident when we’d had an issue with a part from Germany.  I’d worked through the night, setting up emergency shipments by road and air to avoid a factory stoppage on the following day.  By coincidence this was the Friday of a long-weekend trip I was on with Matt, Jerry and Andy Poole to Scotland.  Rather than leaving his office to get updates from my team just a few steps through the open plan office, he persisted in phoning me at regular intervals, including one when I was balancing halfway along the narrow Aonach Eagach ridge above Glencoe.  I got so pissed off with this that I ignored future calls, blaming the lack of signal.  The factory didn’t stop.

In addition, he wasn’t particularly sociable.  I don’t recall him doing anything with the senior management and the only night out we had was when I organised a trip to the County Ground to watch a Twenty20 cricket match.  It was a freezing evening and, having watched most of the match in the bar for warmth, we quickly exited for a Mexican restaurant on the Gloucester Road.  Normally the boss would at least ‘shout’ the drinks bill but no such luck with Michele.  Carlos kept an eye on things and was grateful I didn’t try to undermine Michele’s position, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed my first year back in the Materials environment and wasn’t too bothered when he was recalled to Italy.

Michele Sculco  Score 5/10

Experienced and clever technically, he didn’t have the broader skills to manage a factory and was weak on motivating and dealing with people.  Like many Italians, his first priority was covering his own backside, so he was quick at pointing fingers elsewhere.  Compared to the Design environment, where timescales can be more forgiving, he wasn’t comfortable in the fast-moving life of the factory where things happen more randomly and don’t always have a fault that can be easily pinned on someone.  I bumped into him several times over the next 10 years.  He was getting along fine back in his home territory and was always friendly enough.

With the gates finally closing on the cooking factory at Stoke-on-Trent, Carlos decided that the next Works Director at Yate would be Andrea Marseli, the young, forceful manufacturing manager he’d be grooming for the last couple of years.  We quickly discovered that he had modelled his management style on his mentor and we had acquired a mini-version of Carlos to deal with.  He jumped in with both feet, arrived early, left late and worked his backside off.  Not afraid of confrontation or tricky issues, he tried hard to get to know people, both within the office and on the factory floor.

For me it was easier as Andrea showed a level of respect for my past and was eager to learn more about Materials to fill in some of the gaps he had in his general management portfolio.  We got along pretty well and, as the business started to emerge from impact of the financial crises, he had a relatively smooth ride.  Tony and I kept him from slipping off the rails and Carlos, during his weekly reviews and regular visits, would fill Andrea’s head with the next chunk of necessary operational forward steps.  He didn’t obstruct my team strengthening plans either.  Sadly Meg, with whom I’d worked for 25 years, retired through bad health, but the silver lining was called Dorota di Liseka. 

Each dryer season between September and February we needed to hike the production up, sometimes doubling it. This necessitated the recruitment of a lot (could be several hundred) of temporary agency labour.  During the nineties, a significant proportion had come from the Somalian community living in Bristol, which had led us to an inclusive awareness of Muslim religious festivals, prayer times and menus.  However, the new century had seen a trend towards labour from the new EU member states, and increasingly this meant Poland.  Adventurous, often skilled, young and hard-working, they breathed life and energy onto the shop floor, and it wasn’t long before a few began to emerge as team leaders or technicians.  The problem was that at the end of each season, we’d have to release the temporary people and some real talent slipped away.  The other difficulty was that the supervisory level within the factory didn’t always have the vision to spot the potential or realise that some of these guys and girls had different desirable skills.

Luckily, Steve Ball had heard of a bright girl working on the lines and about to be laid off.  One evening he dropped her CV on my desk with a brusque,

‘She might know something about logistics but she’s finishing tomorrow and starting a new job at the abattoir next week.’

Dorota had a degree in Logistics from a Polish University and seemed exactly what we needed to bring some formality and method to the expediting function of the office.  Meg and Julian were rather ‘seat-of-pants’ in their approach and often spent more time digging themselves out of holes that they probably could have avoided falling into in the first place.  Despite her unfounded doubts about her English, or her nervousness when having to push errant suppliers on the phone, she quickly settled in.  As fast as I could I loaded her up with more challenging work, knowing I’d only have to ask her once or that Patrick would only need to explain the more complex issues a couple of times.  Her pleasant personality and competence quickly cemented her position in the office and her occasional frown directed at the guys would send a signal that maybe the banter or football chat should be eased up a bit and they should get back to focusing on work.

We were slowly getting things back on an even keel in the Department, although the Central Purchasing policy of resourcing a lot of our remaining UK supply base to European or Far Eastern suppliers was presenting some serious logistical challenges.  It’s all very well saving 20% on the component price (big tick for the buyer) by moving a part to a foreign supplier, but if it then costs a fortune to resolve delivery or quality issues, the saving is eroded.  The problem was that Merloni-Indesit was increasingly working in departmental silos and the mis-guided bonus and performance review process reinforced divergent behaviours.

And then another bigger issue landed on the factory.  In 2011 Andrea was summoned back to Italy at short notice to fill another role and Central HR in their wisdom (or because they didn’t know what to do with him) told Carlos to take Luciano Torselleti as replacement.

Andrea Marseli   Score 6/10

I think he learned from me and Tony and developed as a leader during his 18 months with us. The business should have kept him in a factory environment somewhere rather than allowing HR to steer him back into a technical function and losing him to the Centre.  He 'walked the talk’ and people respected him for this.  He also attempted to build some team spirit and essentially let me get along with minimal interference.  He seemed to enjoy his time in the UK and most of the senior managers had an invite to his wedding in Italy.

We had a young manufacturing manager, Rob Hutchinson, who should have been the next Works Director.  He’d the right background, the right persona and was well-qualified. The only problem was that he wasn’t Italian, and we ended up with Luciano.  It was a two-year disaster.

I had some sympathy for him as it couldn’t have been easy for a guy in his late forties to leave his family for an extended period and take on a factory leader role in a country where virtually everyone only spoke English, and to be imposed on a management team who were disappointed their own guy hadn’t been given the chance.  He had a depth of technical and theoretical knowledge but a complete inability to share and enthuse others.  Additionally, his long indoctrination into the Merloni-Indesit way of doing things meant he only knew one way of operating.  Everything else was irrelevant and whatever the Centre said must be true, correct and couldn’t be challenged. This was frustrating for me as the supply chain anomalies of running the only remaining UK factory meant that some of the targets that might be relevant to the European sites needed adapting for us.  I’d argue for some tolerance, but Luciano didn’t want to put his head above the parapet.  The end result was that by the end of the year he’d have to make excuses as to why we’d missed on various stock or response KPIs when it was blatantly obvious at the start that we had different circumstances.

His main brief was to introduce the site to the group’s Indesit Production System approach.  Based on the well-established Toyota Kaizen methods, it was essentially an approach to drive waste (time, movement, scrap, handling etc) out of the operation.  He’d run a pilot project at his previous factory with some apparent success but struggled to get things off the ground in Yate due to the constant need to focus on more immediate issues and priorities, combined with the lack of any sort of budget for such an exercise.  Most of our Italian bosses were capable of a good rant but Luciano’s could be spectacular.  He could completely ‘lose it’ for extended periods and we’d just have to wait, embarrassed for him, until he calmed down.  And his behaviour was sometimes child-like: a couple of us were locked out of his office once because we turned up a couple of minutes late for a meeting, having been dealing with some other issue.

It was clear after the first year that he’d ‘lost the dressing room’ and I had numerous background conversations with Carlos about the difficulties we were facing.  It was tricky for Carlos because he was smart enough to recognise the problem but it was clearly not easy to tell central HR to ‘pull Luciano out and find him something more suitable.’  We struggled on for another year with our leader increasingly opting for self-isolation in his office whilst his team adopted a policy of polite tolerance and just got on with things.  It was never nasty or unkind between us; it just didn’t work.

Quietly in the background, I continued to strengthen the Materials team.  In the office we’d absorbed more work from other departments as we were being organisationally moulded to the central model.  This gave me the excuse to take on another pair of hands and, in response to the internal advert, I had a choice of several graduate-calibre applicants, all currently working on the shop floor.  In the end it was Olena Naujokaitiene who virtually demanded I give her the job and then promptly burst into tears when I told her she’d got it!  The ambition that had fuelled her desire to leave the Ukraine for better prospects and a willingness to take a job doing anything in the hope that something better would come along was so typical of the young Eastern Europeans we were finding working as temps on the assembly lines.

Another key change was in the Stores and associated material handling function where I’d campaigned hard to appoint a manager rather than try and run it with a team leader.  Gary Elliot had done 20 years at the Kinmel washing machine factory before transferring down to Yate for a production management role and I liked his enthusiastic, no-nonsense approach to problems and dealing with people.  Within weeks we could see improvements in performance and accuracy and re-set ourselves for a serious attempt on implementing the Indesit (Toyota) Production System.  I was getting there and, as the new faces settled in, I was more confident that we were doing the right things, even if the results didn’t always go our way.

More positive news was that Luciano had been found another role back in Italy.  Surely whoever replaced him couldn’t be that bad. Rob wasn’t in the frame:  he’d recently left for bigger things, having recognised correctly that his lack of the right birth credentials would always be an obstacle, so next through the door was Giuseppe Zichella (GZ).

Luciano Torselleti   Score 3/10

Hopeless!  He should never have been imposed on us.  He was a nice enough bloke but more like a mad professor who knew the theories but hadn’t clue about delivering the practicalities, and he had no idea how to relate to his students in a foreign environment.  The poor guy didn’t really have command of the language either so was always going to find it tough.  Another classic blunder by central HR trying to make their headcount and resource plans work without understanding the realities.

'Umuntu Ngumuntu Ngabantu’

These were the Xhosa words Giuseppe Zichella greeted his management team with when all were gathered in the conference room. 

‘What?’  The management team raised its collective eyebrows.

In Zulu it means ‘Humanity - I am because we are.’  Apparently this would be his management style and the approach he wanted us to adopt. Well it was different at least…  I wondered if he had any other Zulu philosophies we might be adopting.

A former teacher with roots in rural Italy, he’d moved into manufacturing with Merloni, risen rapidly and was Operations Manager at their showcase Polish dishwasher factory when he got the call to move to Bristol and run the Yate site.  He was in his late thirties and brought his wife and young daughter to a modern apartment down in The Docks and started to assimilate them all into a British way of life.  Carlos, who by now had moved to Russia to manage the huge Lipetsk plant, in addition to maintaining his overall command of Yate, kept a close eye on Giuseppe, and the weekly and monthly review structure prevented him from drifting too far off-script.

This was important because he’d walked into a couple of big problems.  Firstly the launch of the new Futura style for the Hotpoint brand needed to be delayed due to development concerns around some of the large mouldings and the electronic controls.  This meant another year of nursing old tooling and less efficiency.  The bigger issue was caused by our steel supplier, Tata, who, as a consequence of a restructuring within their business, had failed to plan for our orders.  Suddenly we were faced with the prospect of no ‘white' steel to make the various types of front and side panels and, with a 60-day lead time, it wasn’t going to be solved quickly.

We called in the big guns with all sorts of legal threats and entered a period of micro-managing the limited supplies as they became available.  The steel planner, Mike Radford and I seemed to be permanently in conference calls with numerous people at Tata, bullying them into changing process-plans and deliveries. This is a couple of large Welsh steel plants we’re talking about: they’re huge compared to our little factory and usually plan their batch runs in weeks and days, not hours and minutes.  It was a four-month nightmare and it caused considerable disruption to us.  Quite often, especially during the night, I’d be making decisions to send some lines and shifts home early as we were forced to allocate dwindling materials.  When it was all over, we managed to get £250,000 back in compensation though none of it ever reached Mike, Giuseppe or me, although we were the ones who had had to deal with all the aggro and interrupted evenings.

Giuseppe was integrating well.  He’d hooked into the management team and recognised the need for a good working relationship with Tony in Finance and Amy in HR.  With me he adopted a respectful approach, using me as a sounding board for ideas or feedback, and essentially letting me get along with the Materials function with minimal interference.  He also benefitted from the presence of a few compatriots on the wider management team. The Design presence at Yate, Savio Labella, had been joined by a Paolo Comignani in Quality and Stefano Cilla in Production Systems.  It added a whole new dynamic to the management meetings and lunch table chat in the canteen, although it did seem that a lot of the key communication took place by the espresso machine.

He worked hard on team-building and social integration and was genuinely interested in the site history, representing the factory annually at the Remembrance service at the local church and happy to show off the site to visitors.  Always up for an evening out, he steadily worked his way around the restaurants in the City and would tease me for my failure to ‘go for it' some of the more boozy evenings. The truth was I just couldn’t match the consumption or late-night stamina of what was increasingly a younger management team and I often became the soft drink taxi driver.

I was impressed and irritated in equal measure by his desire to get involved in the factory volume planning, the process by which we decided on the ramp-ups, wind-downs, shift and labour requirements for the coming months.  For 30 years I’d virtually had this remit to myself and had evolved a series of fairly slick spreadsheets as visual tools.  Once he’d gained some knowledge, GZ had the nerve to make some improvements and would join me on the monthly calls with HQ to agree the plan. This did become useful as increasingly the Central Planning in Italy tried to exert more random, inexperienced influence.  I have to acknowledge that he had an instinctive feel for supply chains and would sometimes be very useful with ideas or back-up when we hit some of the bigger obstacles.

He always expressed surprise at how I’d managed to build such a strong Materials team and would try to claim I had too big a squad.  The reality was I had the correct-sized team for the challenge with the appropriate mix of graduate and practical backgrounds.  Some of the other functions had allowed themselves to be squeezed and their calibre, with a few exceptions, had slowly declined.  Recently I’d strengthened Gary’s Stores and Handling section by taking on another female graduate.  Elena Aldiss, an Italian in her mid-twenties, had been prepared to join us for a pittance, just to get her foot in the door, but it was clear, with her degree in production systems and previous experience, that she had plenty to offer.  We threw her at the re-layout, part control and Kanban (line replenishment) project and waited to see if she could deliver.  It didn’t take long.  With Gary providing all the practical encouragement and back-up and me offering a systems-guidance and obstacle-removal service, she pushed on.  It wasn’t without tears, but we overhauled the whole process inside of a year and suddenly she was the guru for the way ahead for the rest of the site, possessing all the confidence and language and people skills necessary.  I wanted her on a fast-track management development path and could even see her replacing me in a few years’ time.  But inevitably she was ambitious and wanted to stay in the Bristol area as her boyfriend, Alessio, was working at Airbus.  This ruled out a career path within Merloni-Indesit and when, in 2013, GKN South-West offered her a job at way more than we could afford, it was inevitable than she’d move on in.   Luckily we’ve stayed in touch (see “Best Team Ever” chapter).

Her departure wasn’t a total disaster.  Giuseppe had been approached by a contact to see if he could offer a placement for yet another Italian girl graduate.  Lucia Petti joined us a few months later as a direct replacement and, whilst I wasn’t sure at the outset if 'she’d got what it takes,’ Gary was more optimistic. 

‘She just needs a bit longer to get confident in the language and figure out her role,’ he would counter when I expressed my initial view that she was ‘good at doing what’s asked but can she suggest solutions?' or ‘she seems more like a follower to me than a potential leader.”

A year later Lucia was indispensable: an absolute workhorse and steadily building on the foundations Elena had laid.  (Note:  August 2020 she’s just been appointed the latest Materials Manager.)

Things actually felt quite calm during 2013/14/15, and despite a bit of in and out activity within the team as firstly Dorota and then Olena took time out to start families, it was all going relatively smoothly.  With an eye on the future and the need to obtain some back-up to Patrick, we tempted yet another bright and ambitious young woman into the team when Dorota moved across the office for a new challenge in Finance.  Marzena Czapiga had followed the usual path from Poland, been promoted from the assembly line into Quality Audit, married an English guy and had a baby, and was pushing for a bigger job.  Into the Stores with Gary she went for a year as Team Leader and then joined us in the office, focusing on new products and modifications, before picking up on a supplier planner role.  The team seemed happy, despite knowing that each year they’d be encouraged to join my annual team-building challenge.  Some even reverted to pregnancy in a desperate bid to avoid some of the excursions. (see “Best Team Ever” chapter.)

Despite the day to day hassle of the role, I was anticipating a relatively smooth ride through the next few years to an early retirement in 2017.  Fat chance!  Things were suddenly going to get shaken around again and there’d be a new big mountain to climb.  Merloni-Indesit were looking to sell: the family wanted to cash-in their holdings and get out the business, recognising that their extended run of form was coming to an end.  Even to compete in Europe required huge resources and the market was increasingly dominated by global players.  At one point we thought we’d need to start learning Korean as Samsung showed interest but in the end it was American giant, Whirlpool, who made the acquisition, looking to boost their relatively small European presence.

So it was time to adapt to yet another wave of different organisational structures, commercial planning processes and reporting formats.  Whirlpool European HQ was near Milan and they were dominated by Italians, so no real change there, but it was incredibly bureaucratic, with layers of approval required for every key decision or expenditure.  With some duplication of factories following the merger, it was also clear that rationalisation was on the horizon.  We thought our threat would come if Whirlpool decided to retain their existing dryer factory in Amiens in France.  They were only making half our annual volume but we knew closing factories in France was very difficult politically, and at this point we didn’t know their comparative costs.  However, dryer factory decisions were not at the top of the agenda for the new owners, so we settled into an uneasy truce with Amiens, sharing some best practices and benefitting from the odd volume benefits of sourcing from common suppliers.

Whirlpool was huge organisation and controlled every aspect of the business through a network of common processes and a very strong influence from HR and Finance.  They were excellent on corporate communications and policies but the desire for control at the sharp end didn’t sit well with me.  The Americans took corporate responsibility, especially for safety, very seriously.  This was driven in part by the litigation culture that pervades everything in the USA and, whilst Merloni-Indesit had conformed to European standards, Whirlpool conducted their own audit of the products they’d acquired.

They didn’t like what they found with our dryer's design and were concerned that the risk of a fire from a potential ‘fluff' build-up in some of our models was higher than they were prepared to accept.  It’s true that there had been some incidents over the years, almost inevitable given the technology and the need for customers to clean regularly, but it hadn’t triggered an alert at Merloni or any of the European Safety Standards.  I wasn’t party to the actual incidence per year, the range of severity, or exactly how we compared with other European manufacturers who we knew had similar issues, but it was a big surprise when we heard that a retro-fit solution was being considered for a big chunk of the 10 million dryers we’d made over the previous decade. It was clear that there could be an issue and despite the small risk, on balance I supported the view that it was best to try and correct things in an orderly and controlled manner.  Under big pressure, the Design teams came out with a relatively simple fix that required the rear panel to be replaced with a modified version.  That was the easy bit.  The factory was then tasked with producing over a million replacement kits and gearing up to make an extra 500,000 dryers in 2015 for potential product exchanges.

In the early stages, GZ had been instructed to keep a tight lid on mentioning the size of this challenge as Whirlpool didn’t want any leaks before their PR team had decided on their communication strategies.  Only a few of us were aware of what was planned and were beginning to work out our operational plans when the metaphorical ‘shit hit the fan.’  Thinking they knew best, the American PR ‘experts' had arranged media briefings with the newspapers, TV and consumer organisations like Which magazine.  The 12-month plan for retro-fit or replacement, if necessary, had been agreed with Trading Standards and the Americans  thought this would be a ‘good' PR message.  True it was way more than any other European manufacturer had previously attempted and a sign that Whirlpool were prepared to take a short-term hit on the brand image in order to protect their long-term reputation.  Arrogantly, PR believed they could control the messaging and ended up flying into a tornado!  In simple terms, they hadn’t recognised the power of the British media and its ability to dig out facts (and fictions), create stories (and myths) and influence public thinking.

Sending an invite to a British media briefing was just mistake number one.  A few investigative phone calls later and several newspapers had the story in advance and the rest weren’t far behind, lining up a number of people prepared to tell their story of singed clothes or smoke-damaged utility rooms.  Which and Watchdog went on the offensive, that’s their job after all, and suddenly PR were fighting hopeless, defensive battles on several fronts.  Stuttering TV interviews from various company spokespersons didn’t help and none of the media were interested in the repair programme, let alone the explanations that the risk was very, very low if the products were used as instructed.  I sometimes joined GZ at the daily corporate task-force phone conference as the company tried to get a grip on the runaway beast. 

Think about the numbers.

10 million dryers were out there with probably at least 3 million of them in Europe.  Maybe 20% were no longer in use, so that was 8 million to find and repair.

According to Trading Standards, even the best ‘recall’ exercises only managed about a 20% response rate so even if we managed to reach 30%, we were looking at 2.5 million.  Now, it takes a service engineer about 2 hours to complete the fix, so let’s assume 5 a day, or 500 a day if there were 100 engineers out there (about what we had).   At that rate it would take years.  So let’s recruit another 900 engineers, train and equip them all with vans, and you might reach 100,000 a month and achieve something approaching completion after two years.  Clearly this is still not acceptable, so let’s offer a massive discounted replacement option to people not prepared to wait and meet this demand from extra dryers produced by the factory.  This might just pull the overall time frame down to inside a year.

It needed a hugely expanded Call-Centre, leading-edge call-handling software, an armada of engineers, massive three-shift activity in the factory and complicated and responsive logistics to move all these kits and dryers around the country directly to consumers (rather than via usual outlets like Curry’s).  It was an absolutely huge effort that lasted over a year and cost millions.

It still didn’t cut any ice with the media.  No-one publicly was prepared to accept that even to fix everything inside four months, let alone four weeks, wasn’t possible.

‘Why can’t you recruit more engineers?’

An extra 5000 people might do it but they didn’t exist and the tooling or suppliers wouldn’t be able to keep them stocked with parts anyway as the supply chain was already flat out.

‘Just do a recall and give people replacements.’

In a normal year we make 900,000 with an absolute max using three shifts and six days of 30,000 a week.  Making nothing but replacements would still take a year to make 1.5 million.  Clearly not practical because if we weren’t also satisfying new orders we would be stuffed anyway.

‘Give them their money back.’ 

So what’s a fair deal for a 10 year-old dryer or a 1 year-old dryer?  Let’s say an average of £100 for 2.5m so it would be a cool £250m and ‘Goodbye, Whirlpool UK.’ In addition, people would be without a dryer for months until other competitors eventually satisfied the gap.

It was impossible to put these arguments over as every week there was clamour for an immediate resolution. MPs and journalists refused to put the whole thing in context and they never quoted or contrasted (with microwaves, ovens, cars etc) the actual reported incident percentages.  My understanding was that it was around 0.3%, although I have to say that the Whirlpool experts were a bit woolly about this.  There was always an unhappy customer, safety expert or consumer champion prepared to keep the story alive, although the occasional footage of a fire in a flat or kitchen served as a reminder that, however low the risk, in extreme circumstance, the consequences could be severe.  The possible role of a negligent or careless customer was never mentioned.

The factory accelerated to maximum, adopting a full-on three-shift approach for over a year, constrained only by tooling or equipment limits.  It was hard on the people, suppliers and kit; a few were overwhelmed, but in general most responded and some were stars.  I was really pleased with how the Materials team performed in such protracted, stressful circumstances, occupying, as it did, a pivotal position in the flow of information, parts and products.  Giuseppe held things together, defending the site when the mud flew around at HQ, and keeping chins-up within the workforce.  Long hours, long conference calls, long faces, long lists of problems; it must have felt like the tunnel would never end!  But eventually we got ahead of the demand and products and kits started to go back into stock.

Inevitably it was a new peak year for output.  GZ reminds me that he now holds the record of 1.12 million, a comfortable 13% better than my best, back in 2006.

My view:  Despite the huge cost, it was the right thing to do.  Although the factory did not have the responsibility for the design, or the remedial decisions, I think we all slept a bit better once we were aware there was a risk and that the Company had taken corrective actions.  Interestingly, almost all of our European competitors chose to keep their heads down, despite having issues of their own.

My observation:  The whole saga confirmed what we already knew (with the exception of the US PR team).  The media and consumer champions have a role to play but are ruthless and not interested in good news because their circulations and very existence depend on having ‘a pop' at people or organisations.  The role they play to publicise issues can be escalated way beyond balanced reporting.  In contrast, across Europe, the reporting and reaction was minimal.

Escape Plan

Against this crazy background I’d been speaking with GZ and Carlos about a plan for early retirement, giving them plenty of warning about my intentions.  I wanted to finish in March 2017, but Giuseppe wasn’t keen.  He was entering the final year of his already-extended UK contract and didn’t really want to lose my support and experience, especially as Tony was retiring in 2017.  He teased, cajoled and offered the bait of a pay-off possibility if I’d give it another year.

Strictly speaking, this wasn’t something he could promise, but things were brewing again in Whirlpool as factory rationalisation plans finally came around to the dryer product range.  His assessment (or inside knowledge) was that Yate would be restructured to a smaller, more-focused operation serving mainly the UK and the ‘vented' dryer markets.  This meant they would need to cut fixed costs and reduce staff numbers so there would be a chance that, if I delayed ‘volunteering,’ I could benefit.  He was persuasive and I realigned my plans to early 2018, telling him I was only doing it to help him out.

This meant that the main objectives for my final eighteen months were to find and train a successor, leave the department in good shape and play my bit in ensuring that the rationalisation analysis kept Yate alive as a site.  Once again we went through the process of supplying HQ with detailed performance costings and eventually the decisions were confirmed.  Amiens would close in late 2017 and their volume, plus 25% of ours (top end European products), would go to Lodz, a large Polish factory that was projected to be fully on-stream by mid 2018.  Carlos moved his office temporarily from Russia to Amiens to handle the turmoil that inevitably arises when a French factory is closed.  In his usual way, he negotiated a path between striking workers, posturing politicians and the Whirlpool directors, eventually finding a buyer for the site that would save most of the jobs.

And then, just as we were drafting the restructure plans and budgets for 2018, GZ was given his next assignment, summoned at short notice back to Italy to turn around the Comunanza washing-machine factory, once the jewel of the Merloni empire, but recently struggling to compete against cheaper manufacturers.                                    

Giuseppe Zichella   Score 8/10  (Tell you what make it 8.5 because he’ll only try and talk me up anyway!)

Keen, enthusiastic and sociable and with interests beyond that of just manufacturing.  Once he’d found his feet, he treated me more as a friend and colleague than one of his players, and we’d spend hours in the office throwing thoughts around. I really enjoyed working for him and he was worthy of the role.  Like all Italians, he always had half an eye on his personal ratings, which would mainly be dictated by site performance, but he was also ‘keen' that we gave him good scores on the annual performance assessments or employee surveys.  And he could rant with the best of them when we’d under-performed.  I think Mark timed one such sermon at over 15 minutes; we did acknowledge his undoubted passion for the site but he couldn’t half go on.  In his early days with us he would be quite sensitive to our British mild criticisms or tongue-in-cheek observations on his style, but he relaxed over the years.  Like me, ten years earlier, he was well supported from a distance by Carlos, but was soon capable of representing the site at all levels.  

With his strong Merloni-Indesit background he had a good network of contacts around the organisation, but when Whirlpool took over, this was diluted and he found his profile was harder to maintain from Yate, positioned on the outer rim of their European empire. The move back to Italy had benefits from a family perspective but it didn’t surprise me when he left the business for a bigger global role with an Italian cooker-hood manufacturer.

He remained the only boss who managed to join a few of us for an evening bike ride and embraced the experience of living in Bristol.  He always enjoyed a good social evening and, if my memory serves me correctly, Sue and I still owe him a meal after he shouted the bill years ago for an evening out with him and his wife.

I will never forget his appearance at Southmead hospital within just a few hours of the 2014 bike crash.  (See Crash Chapter).  It seemed a small reciprocal gesture to pop in to see him in the BRI when he had an emergency appendix op’ a few years later, and it was a real shame when our plans to visit him at home in 2019 were thwarted when the camper van broke down.

Next to take up the Works Director seat was Rafal Kozikowski, an up and coming Polish guy, ready for promotion from his operations role at another Whirlpool factory.  Giuseppe had warned him that I would be off within six months, so he viewed me more as a consultant as he took control of the team that included Matt Knight, who was earmarked to replace me. I liked Rafal; he, too, made efforts to learn and integrate into the British approach, bringing his family over and being happy to join various social evenings in town.  But he was finding it tough to move the site forwards. We’d entered yet another phase where money was tight across the Whirlpool European operation and most central resources were being thrown at getting the new dryer factory in Lodz up and running.  Consequently, he had to make do with what he’d got: a factory and suppliers tired after the efforts of the previous couple of years, creaking tools and equipment, and no fresh blood allowed to re-invigorate things.  For Rafal it was worse.  In Poland, with its cheap labour, he’d been able to recruit almost at will and there were always people available to pick up tasks.  In Yate he didn’t have this luxury and most key people were already at maximum.  Needless to say, Central HR failed to recognise the situation and stuck to their corporate headcount ratios and recruitment bans.

MaterialsTeam Meeting October 2018

‘Okay, everyone.  There’s something I want to tell you. You may have suspected it, but I’m finishing at the end of January.’

I’m guessing they might have heard whispers; the senior management plus Matt, Kev and Patrick had been in on the secret for a while, although the actual timing had only been officially confirmed earlier that day.  It was a funny few days as the word spread.  There was a steady stream of people popping into the office or phoning up for a chat. The women claimed to be devastated and the guys claimed to be envious.

The next three months flew by as I tried to pass last-minute thoughts to Matt, suggesting some change of roles in the Department (which ultimately due to changed circumstances didn’t work out) and saying my farewells to some long-term acquaintances across the organisational network and supply chain.

However, there was another departure to deal with first, and I was privileged to make his farewell speech. Carlos, after 15 years of managerial responsibility for UK operations, was being moved from Russia and taking on a new challenging remit, overseeing all of Whirlpool’s southern European factories.

Carlos Ramos  Score  9.5/10

No longer would the phone be ringing almost before I’d sat down: a probing enquiry usually around 7.00am, on the current situation that required a precise response.  No longer would there be a considered silent pause from him in a factory performance conference, enticing one of us to obligingly fill the gap with the real facts, or worse, waffle.  The guy was awesome!  He could converse easily in multiple languages, had seemingly boundless energy, understood manufacturing better than anyone and worked ridiculous hours.  He was direct and to the point, courteous and respectful, never ranted, and was realistic, not being afraid to tell either the Board or the Unions how things really were.

He was a huge friend to the Yate factory, steering me and the management team along the path to longer-term survival, and no doubt advocating robustly our performance and prospects against any doubters at HQ.  We got along well; it was absolutely clear who was the boss, but we developed a friendly relationship based on trust that recognised each other’s strengths and weaknesses (mainly mine).  I’m certain that there would have been occasions over the years, especially when I delivered unsatisfactory results, when he would have needed to defend my position, performance or competence.

Whirlpool should have adopted him onto their Main Board but having been tasked with sorting out the UK, Russia, France and finally Turkey, he’d achieved all he was going to.  He’d always claimed that his plan was to retire before reaching 60 and, in 2019, he waved it all goodbye and headed back to Portugal and his boat.

I thought I might score him 10/10 but if there was a flaw it was that he regularly put the business and his teams before his family. His kids didn’t see much of him growing up and it was a good job his wife didn’t mind moving house and was also multi-lingual.

End of January 2018

And finally it was one last time. The 5:30 alarm, the commute, through the gates, the press shop, the assembly lines, the stores, the suppliers , the log-in, the log-off, the phone calls, the endless e-mails, the problems, the hassle, the frustrations, the people, the people, the people. 

Thirty-seven years - the factory and the people had helped me to help them.

A few things to sign off with that I’m quite pleased about……

We’d survived some major threats from bigger, more prestigious (more costly and arrogant) factories and several changes of name and ownership.  We were the only white goods factory surviving in the UK, and in 2017 the site celebrated 100 years of manufacturing, with a decent chance of continuity for more years to come.

We’d encouraged an environment where diversity was the norm and where it was possible for women, foreigners, or those with a shop-floor background could develop.  I’d like to think I gave most people some opportunity and encouragement over the years

We’d turned a factory that thought 2500 dryers a week was a good performance back in 1982, into one that could make ten times as many in 2018.  

We topped the one million target in 2016

And on a more personal note, I never had a day-off sick, and my only absences were a couple of days for a cartilage operation and a couple of weeks following the dog crash.  Mark Haslam made a (rather lengthy) farewell speech in the office.  I wandered around the site saying my good-byes and walked out of the doors for the last time.

And the question asked at the start? 

Why were the factory gates he drove out of in January 2018 the same ones he drove into in May1981?

Trawling through the memories of 37 years reveals some possible answers.

Confidence:  Was I confident enough in my abilities to jump elsewhere if I wasn’t being pushed?  Possibly not.

Comfort: The surroundings, the people, the processes were familiar.  I knew the score, could handle it and, despite a few dodgy periods, quite enjoyed it.

Commutable:  20 minutes by car, half-an-hour by bike, one hour on foot.  A big benefit in time and money.

Sue:  Why mess her work and social life up if we didn’t need to?

Community:  Why even consider moving from a location where we were lucky to belong to a great social group?

Children:  Established in their schools, activities and friendship groups. Why mess that up for them?

Career:  I was fortunate: promoted at the right times, trained and developed so I could cope, rewarded to appropriate levels (just), and re-aligned when I’d past my peak and satisfied any ambitions. 

Cautious:  In summary, I think my cautious nature, combined with the above factors, offset, in my mind at least, any possible upsides of changing jobs.

And

Finally: It was really 37 years of hugely fortunate circumstances that had enabled one factory to provide the opportunities and environment I needed.

Removed image – Whirlpool logo

Carlos explaining “how it is” to French strikers and politicians