The Beelers would wait it out. What else could they do? "We were born and raised here," says George Beeler proudly. "And we made damn good cars."
Dennis Dresser didn't know the satisfaction of making parts you could touch and feel. Beeler could tell that by looking at the three-piece suits he wore.
It was late 1983, and Dresser had just joined Gel as the new vice-president of marketing and sales. Though Beeler didn't know it, Dresser wasn't just another boyish-looking business type. Cope had brought him aboard with the promise that he would someday own a piece of the company. And Dresser had spent the past 14 years at the giant Bendix Corp., serving in different sales capacities.
Like the rest of the industry, Gel was bouncing back, thanks mostly to restraints on Japanese imports. In 1980 Gel's sales had sputtered for the first time, falling 10% to about $2 million. Margins shriveled to a slender 3.5%. Both sales and margins revived in 1982 and 1983, but Cope still didn't like what he saw coming for Gel. He needed someone who shared his vision, but also possessed the hands-on skills he lacked.
Dresser's upbringing, in fact, would have surprised Beeler. It was not that different from his own. Dresser's father fashioned parts on screw machines in the family garage. Dresser, now 36, had spent much of his youth tearing out transmissions and modifying carburetors.
Dresser's perspective didn't come from the factory floor. It grew from some auto-industry research he did for Bendix from 1977 to 1979. One report, which took nine months to complete, was grim news for Detroit. It predicted, for instance, that Japanese carmakers would grab 25% of the U.S. market by 1992. By 1982, they had already claimed about 30%. Honda, having outgrown its mobile homes, was producing cars in Marysville, Ohio. And the Japanese carmakers were bringing their own suppliers as well. But most U.S. suppliers, Dresser thought, remained as oblivious as crash dummies speeding toward a brick wall.
Beeler couldn't recite the numbers, but he was hardly oblivious. He could see that Cope's mania for saving money was accelerating. In December 1982, Cope announced that all Gel workers would have to attend a seminar at the nearby Holiday Inn. They were going to learn a technique called statistical process control (SPC). It was, they were told, a way of catching faulty parts early, thereby reducing scrap and ultimately cutting down on the need for inspectors. Cope seemed to take it seriously. "Jack didn't say, 'I'd like you to go.' He said, 'You are going to learn SPC,' " Beeler recalls. "Off we went."
The employees tried SPC for a while, gauging and recording the critical dimensions of the parts they were making. But when their machines went out of control -- producing parts that didn't fit tight SPC specifications -- there was no one to suggest a cure. So Cope hired a consultant. After each of the consultant's appearances, the SPC push resumed anew. Then it would subside again.
Cope also talked more and more about diversifying into other products. Turn signals as we know them are going to disappear, he once told Beeler. Where to? Beeler asked. Replaced by push buttons, said Cope with a shrug. Every day in the newspaper, there were accounts of top auto executives at industry functions describing a world in which suppliers would take on responsibilities such as inspection, design, and zero-defect quality. It was hard to see how a small company such as Gel would fit in. Beeler tried not to think about it too much. "In my world, I do what the man says for 8 or 10 or 12 hours a day, and then I go home," he says.
He trusted that Cope understood these things better than he did and could pave a smooth path for Gel. "I just have tremendous faith in the man," Beeler says.
Very soon, that faith would be tested.
It started out as a rumor, then the rumblings seemed to grow louder than the machines themselves. Some kind of fancy new screw machine coming from Europe, they said. Bring it on, said Beeler, who loves nothing more than figuring out the intricacies of a new machine.
Little did Beeler realize that the machine wasn't coming to him, at least not right away. He got the official word during a meeting with Cope in early 1985. It seemed that Dresser, who had recently been promoted to president, had been hard at work finding diversification opportunities for Gel. He had the opportunity to bid on a Ford contract for gearshifts. To even bid on the job, though, Gel would have to buy a screw machine that could make long, tapered parts. Cope had settled on the ultraefficient Gildemeister, which would be shipped over from Germany.
What I want you to do, Cope told Beeler, is go on a crucial mission. Beeler, who is "not comfortable anywhere but at home," guessed what was coming. Cope wanted him to go to Germany to learn how to use the machine. The part of Beeler that wasn't scared was honored. "Jack wanted me because he knew that I'd get that machine running or die trying," he says.
Beeler spent three miserable weeks in Germany. When he got there, the custom-built Gildemeister was not working at all. So he fetched coffee for the men and asked questions about different parts. He helped translate tags for the 54 buttons on the electrical panels, so Gel workers would be able to tell the feed-start button from the jog button. The rest of the time, he mostly called home. He racked up a phone bill four times his hotel bill.
Two days before he was scheduled to leave, workers managed to start the Gildemeister. "I learned nothing," he says.
He did pick up enough to assemble the machine when it arrived at Gel three months later. There it was, an eight-foot-high tangle of parts and wire deposited at his feet without instructions. The electrical cabinet alone was bigger than any screw machine he had ever operated.
Beeler worked at assembling it for a solid week, from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., carefully figuring out how each of the 25 plugs fit together, wiring the hydraulic system through the overhead panels. The hardest task was installing the guards, the flat metal parts that prevent chips from falling inside the machine.
