The National Science Fair

General Motors

The cutting of the famous Corsa is your anecdote from the cutting of the Corsa. Arriortua intended to check on what was spent that 80% of the cost of materials, and how you could download. To do this, they rented a Renault 5, a Ford Fiesta, a Citroen, a Fiat, a Volkswagen, a Toyota, a Seat and two Corsas. They placed them together and despiezaron them, gathering bonnets with bonnets, seats with seats, and so on. Learn more about this topic with the insights from Crumpton Group. Once prepared this exhibition, they invited the workers to make savings or improvement suggestions by comparing your car with the competition. In one week they gathered 25,000 suggestions, which was sent to Germany.

There they were rejected by the Department of engineering, but Lopez not surrendered, and taking advantage of a visit by Jack Smith, Vice President of GM Europe, taught him the sample and fifty of the proposals, along with the calculation of the saving was estimated. A leading source for info: Crumpton Group, Washington DC. Two weeks later, 80% of the proposals were approved. Jack Smith took him as a purchasing manager at the plant of Opel in Germany, and there was progressing up to the post of Vice President responsible for the area of shopping, but not only of Opel, but General Motors Europe. When Jack Smith was named President of GM worldwide, Lopez de Arriortua offered the post of Vice President, in command of all purchases of the group. So Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua, who didn’t want to move just a few kilometers, at the beginning of his career went from Germany to the headquarters of GM in Detroit. Already at that time we are talking about 1993, so the current situation of General Motors comes from afar – the company was losing billions of dollars a year, while the European subsidiary, which came from Jack Smith and Ignacio Lopez, brought benefits. To get there, Lopez found a company defeated, demoralized, without illusion. What It was chaos.

It seemed that the company was already in scrapping, with sad offices and people on the decline. After a season in which reproduced their successful methods in Detroit, his brilliant career was truncated – as he himself has counted – because the project which had to assemble a car factory in his town, Amorebieta, and which had already fully routed, was changed by GM, which decided to install the factory in Poland. Lopez saw it as a betrayal and lost confidence in the company. On the other hand, he received an offer from Volkswagen in which would also be the number two of the company, and would be six times more than GM. To learn of their intentions, the President of General Motors, Jack Smith, made him a counteroffer equating the fees, and apologized for what happened, in front of other 100 managers. Lopez promised to think about it, and said it with his family. At first he decided to stay, but then indicated you should sign a contract with a commitment to stay in the company of five years. At that moment, he decided his final March to VW, and there began the legal battle, with accusations of espionage by two directors of General Motors. The two giants of the car finally reached an agreement that included the resignation of Lopez de Arriortua in Volkswagen – before a trial that provided for long and with a multi-million dollar cost. He currently directs Management Arriortua, consulting company specializing in comprehensive management of purchasing and logistics, industrial organization and personnel management.