By Tom Brennan, Material Director - Saturn, Wilmington Plant

Over the past decade, one of the most watched developments in the automotive industry has been the emergence and success of Saturn. With its homespun image, high-quality vehicles and sky-high customer enthusiasm, the small-car company of General Motors has made an indelible impression on the automotive industry. After nine years of contending for a portion of the shrinking small-car market, Saturn retailers across the nation began receiving the "next big thing" from Saturn in July of 1999. Targeted to compete with the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry, Saturn's new 2000 L-Series sedans and wagons (L is for larger) are giving Saturn dealers a crack at the robust mid-size car market.

Unlike the "clean-sheet-of-paper" approach of an all-new plant which drove the successful introduction of Saturn in 1990, this new rollout had a unique set of challenges. The following is the story of our alliance with our lead packaging provider, ORBIS, and some of the obstacles we overcame together to successfully implement a high-tech returnable packaging solution for the new generation of Saturn vehicles.

The Challenge of Space and Time

In August 1996, GM announced that Saturn would be building a new class of vehicles at the Wilmington, Delaware facility. Home of the Chevy Malibu, the Wilmington Plant was a 50-plus year old, 3 million square-foot GM assembly plant on 105 acres that boasted it had built at least one car from every GM brand. To accommodate the manufacturing of this new class of vehicles, the Wilmington plant would require the investment of more than $550 million and a lot of planning and coordination to prepare for its new role.

By late 1997, the Wilmington team was ready to begin tackling the implementation of their material handling and delivery systems to support the June 1999 production target. A new role of Lead Packaging Provider (LPP) was created to coordinate the returnable packaging programs across all of our sites. With production only 18 months away, the decision was made to partner with ORBIS, which already had experience at our Spring Hill, Tennessee, plant (and several GM Plants in North America). As our LPP, ORBIS was responsible for expediting the packaging program and ensuring consistency across our suppliers and manufacturing plants.

The first notable challenge was space. Unlike our 4.7 million square-foot home plant in Spring Hill, which sprawls across 2,350 acres, the Wilmington facility did not have enough space to keep all its parts in inventory like the -"supermarkets" found in many assembly plants. Working closely with ORBIS, we developed a unique delivery and storage system that minimized the required warehouse and delivery space. A big part of this solution included the implementation of an electronic card pull system for all small lot items stored in an off-site warehouse.

The second major constraint was time. With less than 18 months to work with, our small team of packaging and procurement professionals and ORBIS' two project managers faced the challenge of designing, purchasing and implementing a total returnable system for more than 1,800 parts. This tight timeline was further intensified with the changing requirements that are inherent in designing a new vehicle, last minute part-sourcing decisions for suppliers, contract issues with part vendors, and issues stemming from the merger of two very different systems (GM and Saturn).

Working together to overcome these roadblocks, the Saturn-ORBIS team successfully prioritized project resources into a manageable timeline. All known supplier parts were evaluated early in the process so the team could focus on accommodating engineering changes as the launch date drew near.

Choosing the Right Returnable Packaging Products

The returnable packaging selected for the Wilmington plant was consistent with the products utilized at the Spring Hill facility. These products included ORBIS standard plastic straight-wall hand-held containers with custom-designed dunnage organized on 45x48-inch plastic pallets, thermoformed storage trays, metal baskets and plastic collapsible bulk containers.

Much like Spring Hill, the requirements for container selection and dunnage design included (but were not limited to):

• Selecting standardized (but optimal) container sizes when possible
• Maintaining enough parts for a one-hour build quantity on the line
• Limiting container loads to 35 pounds
• Part protection level required
• Part orientation (easy for assembly members to access and remove)

As the Wilmington plant was renovated, many standard plastic containers that previously handled Chevy Malibu parts were fitted with new interiors and reallocated to the L-Series production. This significantly reduced the up-front costs associated with procuring a fleet of containers to fill the packaging system. While the practice at Spring Hill was for each supplier to purchase and manage their own container fleet, at Wilmington the decision was made for Saturn to own and pool returnable containers for all its suppliers.

Gaining the Competitive Advantage

To help keep production time low and maintain a competitive edge, the Saturn-ORBIS packaging team had several goals for the new L-Series returnable program, including:

• The efficient implementation of returnable packaging for 75 percent of incoming parts by launch date
• Enhanced worker productivity through decreased walk time and dunnage handling
• Improved part orientation
• Increased value added time for operators

These goals were achieved by the timely creation of innovative packaging and material handling designs developed and implemented through the partnership of our manufacturing engineers, materials department and ORBIS. In fact, by the June 1999 production target more than 90 percent of all incoming parts were packaged in returnables!

Returnable Packaging Means "XL" Savings for Saturn

In addition to meeting all the packaging goals on-time and within budget, the Saturn-ORBIS team designed, sourced and implemented a returnable packaging system that provides our production assembly team members with easy access to damage-free parts.

In the first year of implementation alone, we experienced millions of dollars of benefits resulting from production efficiencies; reduced transportation and storage costs; and the avoidance of costs related to the purchase and disposal of expendable packaging.