Payoff Due on Barra’s Effort to Speed GM Product Development

Efforts begun two years ago to streamline product development at General Motors Co. will produce their first results this autumn, notes Automotive News.

The strategy has been spearheaded by Mary Barra, a 30-year veteran of GM engineering and manufacturing. She was heading GM human resources before being named senior vice president of global product development in February 2011.

Since then Barra has pushed to cut bureaucracy, freeze design decisions sooner and eliminate last-minute engineering changes that boost costs and slow the pace of development. She has said the changes are saving GM about $1 billion per year.

Last summer Barra eliminated a layer of management by putting each product program under a single vehicle line executive. AN says the change eliminated a structure that often led to squabbles among three engineering executives over relatively trivial design decisions.

She tells the newspaper her approach is to encourage "rigorous debate" about dissenting views before starting a project. But then she demands strict adherence to the resulting plan.

Analysts note that a wave of new-product introductions over the next 18 months will be the first indication of how well Barra's strategy translates into smooth launches of attractive, high-quality products.