What Would You Do?

Chapter 10
Cessna Headquarters, Wichita, Kansas.

The words Cessna Skyhawk have special meaning for anyone who has ever wanted to learn to
fly. At 27 feet long and 8 feet tall, with a 36-foot wingspan, a 140 mph cruising speed, and room
for two adults and their luggage, more people have learned to fly with a Cessna Skyhawk than
with any other plane in aviation history. In fact, the Cessna Skyhawk is the best-selling plane of
all time. Clyde Cessna built his first plane in 1911, and Cessna became a storied name in
aviation. Cessna built 750 gliders for the army in World War II, introduced the Skyhawk in
1956, produced the first turbo-charged and cabin-pressurized single-engine planes in the 1960s,
delivered its first business jet in the 1970s, topped $1 billion in sales in the 1980s, and then, in
one of the worst downturns in the history of aviation business, nearly went out of business over
the next decade and a half.
Sales of general aviation aircraft, which had topped out at 17,000 planes per year,
dropped to 12,000 planes within a year, and over the next decade finally hit rock bottom at 928
planes for the entire industry. During the same time, Cessnas sales of piston-engine planes, like
the Skyhawk, dropped from 8,000 per year to just 600. Cessna was forced to lay off 75 percent
of the employees at its piston-engine plane factories (Cessna also makes business jets and larger
planes) and eventually stopped making piston-engine planes altogether. However, after the
economy improved and the U.S. government approved the General Aviation Revitalization Act
(barring product liability lawsuits on any plane over 18 years old), Cessna decided to start
building its legendary Skyhawks again.
This is where you come in. With nearly 20 years in the company, your first job with
Cessna was teaching Cessna dealers how to service and maintain single-engine planes. But now,
with profits flowing again and the companys legal risk greatly reduced thanks to the
Revitalization Act, youve been made the vice-president of Cessnas new single-engine
business. Its your job to rebuild this part of the business from the ground up. And because pilots
tend to remain loyal to the kind of airplane on which they learned to fly, much depends on your
success or failure. If you can rebuild Cessnas single-engine business, the pilots that learn to fly
on todays Cessna Skyhawks will be buying Cessna business jets 20 years from now.
One of the advantages of starting completely over is that you get to design the entire
production facility, from its location, to the new workers, to the suppliers, everything is up for
grabs. For instance, Cessna does most of its production in Wichita, Kansas. But since it left the
single-engine plane business, Wichita mostly produces a small number of highly customized jets
each year, just the opposite of your business, which is a high number of standardized, single-
engine planes. So, given the differences, you locate the new single-engine plane factory in
Independence, Kansas, two hours away by car, and only 40 minutes away in one of Cessnas
small planes. Along with a new location, youre debating taking a new approach to
manufacturing planes by using production teams. This decision may strike some colleagues as
radical, particularly at conservative-minded Cessna where, one of your fellow managers
admitted, we probably got into a mode of doing things for the future based on how we'd always
done things in the past. But the more you think about it, the more you are convinced that it is
the right decision. Instead of using a standard production line where each worker does just one
task, you are thinking about using teams to assemble Skyhawks and other single-engine planes.
In an incredible departure from the engineering-based standards in which the motions of every
worker on the assembly line are studied for time, cost, and efficiency implications, production
teams would be completely responsible for assembling the planes and for costs and quality.
You expect to see several benefits from a team-based approach, increased customer
satisfaction from improved product quality, faster, more efficient production, and higher
employee job satisfaction. A few things worry you, however. Despite all of their promise, teams
and teamwork are also prone to significant disadvantages. Theyre expensive to implement. They
require significant training. And they only work about a third of the time theyre used. So,
despite their promise, you cant ignore the reality that using teams would be quite risky for
Cessna.
Still, you cant help thinking that teams could pay off and that there might be ways for
you to minimize the risk of failure. For example, because the plant will be in a new location,
Independence, Kansas, you get to start with a brand new workforce. What kinds of people should
you hire for teamwork? What kinds of skills and experience will they need to succeed in a team
environment? If you decide to take the plunge and use teams, how much authority and
responsibility should you give them? Should they be limited to just advising management, or
should you make them totally responsible for quality, costs, and productivity? Finally, while
youre considering using teams on the assembly line, are there other places in which you might
use teams? Not all teams are alike. Maybe there are other places in which teams could contribute
to the success of Cessnas new single-engine plane-manufacturing facility?


If you were in charge of Cessnas new single-engine factory, what would you do?

Sources:
You. Happy. You. Learning to Fly, Cessna. [Online] Available http://www.cessna.com/learn-
to-fly.html [accessed 22 May 2011]; T. Greenwood, M. Bradford, & B. Greene, Becoming A
Lean Enterprise: A Tale of Two Firms, Strategic Finance, 1 November 2002, 32; B. Milligan,
Cessna Uses Baldrige Process to Identify Best Suppliers, Purchasing, 6 April 2000, 75; J.
Morgan, Cessna Charts a Supply Chain Flight Strategy, Purchasing, 7 September 2000, 42; J.
Morgan, Cross-Functional Buying: Why Teams Are Hot, Purchasing, 5 April 2001, 27; J.
Morgan, Cessna Aims To Drive SCM To Its Very Core: Here Are 21 Steps And Tools It's
Using To Make This Happen, Purchasing, 6 June 2002, 31; P. Siekman, Cessna Tackles Lean
Manufacturing, Fortune, 1 May 2000, I222 B+; P. Siekman, The Snap-Together Business Jet;
Bombardier's New Recipe: A Dozen Big Pieces, Four Days To Assemble Them, And It's Ready
To Fly, Fortune, 21 January 2002, 104A.