(FORTUNE Magazine) – The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy and does not require too much from individuals. He takes individual talent into account and uses each man according to his capabilities. -- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

IN 1985, about 2,500 years after those words were written, a group of machinery makers at a Cincinnati Milacron plant in the farmlands of Ohio decided to take Sun Tzu's advice. They formed a multidisciplinary team -- each . . . according to his capabilities -- to develop a plastics injection molding machine they believed could be the last hope to save their jobs, and maybe their company, from foreign competition. Their experience shows how something quite simple -- old-fashioned cooperation -- can be a big boost for manufacturing. Composition of the team broke Milacron traditions: It included people from purchasing, marketing, inventory, and manufacturing -- as well as from engineering. But it was time to break traditions. Leading the onslaught of imports were Japanese machines, and everyone in the auto belt knew what that could mean. So why not study Sun Tzu, a Chinese general who beat just about every army he ever faced? When he went to battle, he was the onslaught. For inspiration, all 11 team members read The Art of War. The arrival of foreign-built plastics machinery in the U.S. market was camouflaged by good times. Bruce Kozak, who joined Milacron as an intense young salesman in 1976, remembers rarely seeing a foreign machine until 1980. When imports started turning up with names like Nissan and Toshiba, the market for plastics-molding machines was growing about 10% a year, and U.S. makers felt cocky. Milacron's sales were increasing, though at a slower pace than the market, which meant the company was losing share. By 1985 foreign suppliers had seized 50% of the market. Of the 15 U.S. companies making injection molding machines in the early 1980s, only five survive today. Milacron, whose plastics machinery division had sales of almost $300 million last year, is the largest domestic manufacturer. It owes that leadership position in part to a chance meeting between Kozak and Harold Faig, then a product manager with a weekend work habit. One Sunday early in 1985, Kozak, a regional sales manager based in California, bumped into Faig at division headquarters in Batavia, Ohio, a small town 25 miles east of Cincinnati. The two started talking over coffee. Kozak complained that imports were swamping California and that he was getting scared. Soon they began listing on a blackboard the specifications a machine would need to beat the Japanese. They dubbed their dream machine the Hafakozaki -- ha for Harold, fa for Faig, and kozak for Kozak. About a month later in California, Faig took Kozak to dinner and announced that the idea had been approved by corporate headquarters. ''What's approved?'' asked Kozak. ''The Hafakozaki,'' replied Faig. ''We're gonna build it. I want you on the team, but I need total commitment.'' Kozak signed on but confesses that he had his doubts. To make a machine competitive with the best on the market, they would have to reduce costs 40%, increase functionality (speed and operating times, for example) 40%, and cut the usual two-year development time in half. Says Kozak: ''I wasn't sure we could do it.'' BUT FAIG, 42, is someone who doesn't know that you can't do things. Raised in an Ohio orphanage, he walked into a Milacron plant at age 19 and got a job assembling machinery. For the next 12 years he labored during the day and attended college at night -- first at the University of Cincinnati and then at the city's College of Mount St. Joseph -- until he earned a bachelor's degree in business. Later he added a master's degree, also by studying at night. Now he reads office reports, trade press, and the like until two-thirty most nights, and rises at around 6 A.M. That way he is free to roam the plant floor and work with people during the day. Faig's only frequent pastime is reading; he says he would work every day if it weren't for his wife and two children. For a man of his achievement, he is quiet and modest. But one associate calls him ''the bulldog.'' Faig handpicked his team -- nine other men and one woman, all in their 30s -- and immediately started pushing. Instead of reducing the development time from two years to one, as he and Kozak had discussed, Faig alloted nine months to build a demonstration model. ''If a woman can make a baby in nine months, so can we,'' he told the group. The team counted out 270 days, to December 12, 1985, renamed the machine Project 270, and invited Milacron President Daniel Meyer (recently made chief executive) and David Noffsinger, the vice president for plastics who had approved the project, to flip the switch on that day. The team's first task was to talk with customers and look at rival machines. What they found stunned those who had never been out in the market. Milacron machines came with more engineering options than imported machines, but delivery from Milacron could take months while Japanese models often arrived the next day. And Milacron's price could be 40% higher. Team members particularly recall a man in California who had priced Milacron machines before buying Japanese. The man had tears in his eyes when he explained that he wanted to buy American -- he had been a prisoner of war in Japan -- but now he was a businessman. ''That really galvanized us,'' says Bill Reinhart, one of the team's four engineers. To further motivate themselves when they returned to the plant, team members had their offices moved close together. Faig arranged for the group to report directly to the vice president of plastics machinery, Raymond Ross, thereby eliminating several layers of middle management. He also asked team members to keep records of their work so others could later learn from the experience. Says Faig: ''We knew the high-muckety-mucks were behind us on this, but that our destiny was in our own hands.'' Team members worked hard to avoid the pitfalls of committeehood. The full group met only once a week, on Mondays, to keep atop developments. No decisions were to be made at these meetings since, they reasoned, any matter brought to the meeting for determination was a decision that had already been delayed. Instead, the rule was ''make decisions daily'' as problems arose. The group also decided not to talk about their deliberations with nonteam members. That broke down barriers between disciplines because a salesman, for instance, might then venture a naive idea about an engineering problem without fear that he would wind up as the laughingstock of Milacron's engineers. And vice versa. As development of the P-270 proceeded, a number of precepts emerged. ''No sacred cows'' headed the list. The first cow banished from the barn was the English system of measures. Since the group wanted a worldclass machine to beat the Japanese, it decided to use metric measurements. ''I knew we had to globalize or die,'' says Faig. When word leaked out, powerful defenders of tradition in other parts of the company (which also manufactures robots and machine tools) protested to David Noffsinger, who nonetheless backed the team's decision to go metric. ANOTHER BIG CHANGE was a decision to use cast (that is, molded) iron for a critical part called a platen, which holds the molds the machine uses to form plastic products. Milacron engineers had a longstanding preference for plate steel -- even though it produced tons of waste during the machining process -- because they believed cast platens were more vulnerable to design flaws. But the team members argued that computer-aided design had improved cast parts. The group also moved to single-sourcing -- a system commonly used by the Japanese -- offering suppliers years of business in return for improving such things as quality control and delivery schedules. ''Don't reinvent the wheel'' turned out to be another useful guide. At the start most team members assumed the Japanese price advantage owed a lot to inexpensive Japanese components. But when they examined a Japanese machine, they found that the parts weren't so much inexpensive as they were sensibly assembled. The team decided they could do as well with standard American parts. In one step, for instance, manufacturing engineer Ken Cenci persuaded design engineers to restrict themselves to six standard-size screws and bolts. Previously design engineers had called for any size that suited their fancy, until the plant was using more than 300. In the end, P-270 incorporated some new and proprietary electronic controls and some refinements in the hydraulic system. But by and large, says Bob Meyer, a manufacturing engineer, it was made of ''bits and pieces we all knew about. And it's almost 100% domestic content.'' ''Tear down the walls'' became a team rallying cry. Meyer says that the old way of developing a machine was for engineers to design it in seclusion, then ''throw the design over the wall'' to manufacturing, purchasing, and marketing. The interdisciplinary nature of the team tore down that wall, and others gave way as well. Corporate accounting provided the team with data, such as profit margins on existing injection molding machines, that was usually closely held. And the group shared design plans with suppliers to get their help in lowering costs. Information about the project apparently never leaked out through the suppliers. When Faig planted a rumor that Milacron would import its new machines, the rumor survived until the P-270 was introduced at an Atlanta trade show. As the deadline approached to unveil a demonstration model, Ethel Watson, the team's cost accountant, discovered that the cost of the P-270 was only 35% lower than its predecessors. ''I was the bean counter,'' she says, ''and there were too many beans. I felt responsible, but I couldn't believe Harold would hold us back for 5%. Now I know better.'' Faig's response to the news was: ''Unacceptable. If we don't make 40%, we won't do it.'' The team returned to work and squeezed an additional 5% out of the machine in time to beat the deadline. The big brass switched on the P-270 prototype, renamed Vista, during a party with cake and cigars at the Batavia plant on December 7, 1985 -- Pearl Harbor Day. When the first Vistas hit the market late in 1986, Bill Reinhart remembers, there was an agonizing lull. For some months, work on the shop floor had been thinning as Milacron's foreign competitors captured more of the market. ''Then suddenly, whooosh,'' he says. Milacron won't release exact numbers, but in Vista's first full year of production the company sold 2.5 times as many of the machines as it had in the best year of Vista's predecessor. Milacron quickly formed teams to redesign its other injection molding machines in the Vista style, a process now nearing completion. IT'S EASY TO SEE why Milacron would want to duplicate its Vista experience. Stephen Bright, president of Electra Form Inc., a company that makes molds for plastics machines, says, ''Vista's a worldclass machine all right, one of the two or three best.'' Toyota recently contracted to buy three of the newest and largest models for its auto plants in the U.S. At the request of corporate headquarters, Harold Faig is recruiting what he calls ''killers,'' dogged and resourceful leaders like himself, to head Vista-type teams in other parts of Milacron. (The company's recent performance has been hampered by a sweeping reorganization of the machine tool division.) And as vice president and general manager of the injection molding division, he is overseeing a $35 million plant expansion that will double capacity to manufacture Vistas. If the Vista campaign suggests pointers, this one from General Sun Tzu should be near the top of the list: He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign. Modern translation: Don't meddle with your General Faigs in the field. Nor is there need to rush out and hire Faig and his team away from Milacron. Good people are indigenous to most companies. Find them. Give them tools and a challenge. If you can't locate any, Sire, you are probably sitting on them.

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