General Motors root cause analysis and operational challenges

¶ … General Motor

Root cause analysis

When the root cause analysis (RCA) was carried out of General Motors the main problems that were identified were lack of efficiency due to communication and listening problems, the ever rising competition especially from Toyota with their Hybrid series, the redundancy in the design of their cars, the issue of environmental concern among the environmentalists and the whole issue of reliability of their brand.

Due to these identified challenges within the firm, the following are the recommended actions that are bound to make the company more efficient. There is need to have an efficient communication process especially over the quality alert and customer related issues so that the supply base as well as the employees understands the quality concern. The communication channel should purposefully have it in agenda to communicate clearly the failure modes and the subsequent corrective actions to be well communicated. This communication channel should expose why the failures were not prevented, and when it happened why it was not detected, the reason as to why the failure was not predicted and also help pass across the corrective measures company wide. To further enhance the effectiveness of the communication process, there is need to have periodic reviews, magazines, minutes posted on the organization website or sent to each employee as appropriate to enhance communication and access to appropriate information (General Motors Corporation, 2001).

To beat the competition, there is need for a thorough marketing of the products of GM in order to make the brand visibility be higher than it is currently. The company needs to use all the available means and ways to make their brand visible a priority in this marketing strategy. This is so important bearing the fact that one of the outstanding aspects in the RCA is the brand visibility of Toyota as opposed to the invisible GM.

There is need also to train the design team in the organization to be able to come up with new designs that are well engineered in order to beat the versatility that is found in other competitors. This can also be achieved more effectively by collaborations with other smaller players in the market so that GM can fuse the design fro other companies with the engineering prowess that they have in order to achieve an outstanding design of a car.

The issue of the environment and the shift in weather trends has also been a challenge to the organization. It has been a company venture to do the best they can to stem the environmental degradation as well as cut down o the emission of pollutants in the environment. With this, there have been invented electric cars and even generally improving on the fuel efficiency (CSR Wire, 2012). This is a trend that should continue and more research and engineering skills should be employed to ensure that their products and the system of production is as environment friendly as possible.