AlvinofDiaspar
Moderator
From the article:
During a months-long Star investigation reporters spoke with current and former Bombardier executives and managers, line workers and union representatives in Thunder Bay and in Sahagun, TTC engineers and executives, Metrolinx employees, politicians, city hall insiders involved in the contract’s origins, and industry experts. We examined court documents, Bombardier’s contracts around the world, and filed freedom-of-information requests. While Bombardier has admitted the company had issues producing the streetcars, it would not respond to many questions about the details of production problems. “At this point we do not have the ability to chase down many of the technical questions, allegations or rumours,” said a spokesperson.
Among the key themes that emerged:
- A failure to properly plan and design vehicles to fulfil the contract’s terms and meet the TTC’s demands. For example, wheelchair accessibility was the reason the city opted for the 100-per-cent low-floor model, yet over a period of three years Bombardier failed to design and order ramps that would adequately meet TTC requirements.
- Persistent manufacturing quality issues. To take one example from dozens, at one point, the TTC discovered some of the electrical systems on the first nine vehicles would mysteriously turn on and off. Electrical connector pins in the cars had not been correctly installed and thousands needed to be manually checked while the cars sat idle.
- An inability to co-ordinate a global production line. Car parts are supposed to be mass produced to a standard so they can be fit together easily, but so many pieces have been delivered in non-standard sizes and shapes that a TTC engineer characterized the assembly of vehicles in Thunder Bay as being “hand-built.” A factory worker characterized it more bluntly: “They take f---ing hammers and they smash the steel into shape, like it’s a f---ing dwarves’ forge.”
- An inability to manage a supply chain. At one point in 2015, a quarter of Thunder Bay production line workers were temporarily laid off because they didn’t have enough parts on hand to work with. When the Star visited the plant in April 2017, a factory worker told us they sometimes lack the parts to do their jobs.
- A tin ear to public and government partner concerns, particularly puzzling coming from a company whose customers are public agencies and which has received government bailouts. This was on display this spring when it was revealed Bombardier planned to pay six executives bonuses totalling $32 million, just weeks after receiving a $372.5-million loan from the federal government, and roughly a year after receiving $3.3 billion in investments from the Quebec government and that province’s pension fund. After public outcry, CEO Alain Bellemare said they had done a “bad job” explaining and the company deferred almost half of the increased compensation, making it dependent on company performance.
- Repeated failure to properly diagnose problems to be able to set and meet a revised schedule. For example, in July 2015, Bombardier was insisting to the TTC that it would be producing four cars per month by September of that year — it has yet to hit that rate two years later (in the first months of this year, they have delivered one car per month).
Most notably, workers at the Sahagun plant were failing at what one official calls the “black art” of welding.
Components of the car were being produced at different sizes from what drawings specified. When assembled, the steel sidewalls were not flat, leaving gaps with mating parts. The parts needed extra attention when put together.
...
In early 2014, the mood in Bombardier’s Thunder Bay assembly plant was grim. Production was at a standstill. Not a single streetcar had left the plant in more than six months.
Veteran workers complained that long-standing problems with the assembly of the TTC Rocket subway car, which was also being built in Thunder Bay, hadn’t been resolved in years.
“We have way too much of some parts and not enough of some other parts,” wrote an anonymous worker in his union newsletter. “How does this happen?”
In a modern, 21st-century global manufacturing corporation, shipping parts to a plant for “just-in-time” assembly was supposed to be the most basic of tasks. Managers, the worker wrote in his “C Bay Rant,” had assured workers that streamlining the supply chain “was the easiest problem to solve.” But it was little more than talk, he concluded, because “Here we are two years later STILL WAITING FOR PARTS!!”
http://projects.thestar.com/bombardier-ttc/
It is now 2018. SSDD.
AoD
Last edited:
