But the indirect effect of Connor's unusual system may be even more dramatic: just as Harvard's Zuboff might have predicted, it is altering the way the company operates. Information is now both widely available and easily accessible, so employees all over the organization have begun to ask questions and to learn more about matters affecting their own jobs. Then too, the company evidently welcomes initiative -- so plenty of employees have begun to propose new ways of doing things. Consider four examples:
* Javier Castro, a setup man working the second shift, has begun making it a practice to consult the computer about upcoming jobs. Noticing that a part for Hughes Aircraft was being done in two steps, he checked the price, then calculated that he could do it more cheaply in one step on his computer-numerical-control machine. So he proposed the change to his supervisor, Ron Washburn. "Within three days I had the job, with no secondary operations," says Castro. "We saved probably 200 hours of secondary operations per order."
* Judy Quinn and Jan Morgan, who handle most of Connor's customer service, always knew they were spending a sizable chunk of their time handling change orders on jobs, but couldn't figure out where all those changes were coming from. Earlier this year they asked Quarrey if the new system would allow them to track the orders. It would. Pulling up the reports, the two women found that roughly one out of every five change orders was internally generated -- and that a significant fraction of those were caused by initial errors in entering an order. "So we developed a purchase-order checklist," says Quinn, "a list of items to be checked to make sure we didn't miss anything. That's cut down on the internal change orders significantly."
* Karla Penalba, in charge of purchasing, was hearing from top management that raw-material quality was key to Connor's manufacturing quality. Yet she realized she had no systematic information on individual vendors' performance in such areas as on-time delivery. So last February she and Quarrey set up a spreadsheet-based program to track every shipment; since then she has produced reports rating Connor's suppliers. Later this year new purchasing software will be integrated with the shop-order system, making it possible for anyone in the building to learn the status of raw-material deliveries.
* Jeff Applegate, an outside sales manager, asked for and got a laptop computer last January. Up till then he had relied on phone calls and occasional handwritten reports to keep the shop up to date about his customers' needs; since then he has been generating a flood of neatly printed memos, which are circulated to the appropriate people and posted on the bulletin board. "The more information people get from me, the more they understand the customer's needs," says Applegate. "Pretty soon the toolmaker and the production foreman and engineering are anticipating, not just reacting." Later this year Applegate and Connor's other salespeople will get high-speed modems allowing them, too, to tie into the shop-order system -- and to check a job's progress or enter comments from remote sites.
Sloss and Quarrey themselves have plenty of ideas for the future. The "quality alert" notices issued for troublesome jobs by Lopez's quality-control department will soon pop up automatically on shop orders. Late deliveries will automatically be flagged for later analysis. Most ambitious, each step in every job will soon be coded, so the corporate office can then calculate and produce a P&L statement not only by plant but also by department. That information, too, will be shared. The rationale? "We're taking the knowledge necessary for business decision making and giving it to people in the shop," says Quarrey. "That has been the philosophical objective -- to give people enough information to change their roles."
* *
Introducing the new system in the Los Angeles plant cost close to $100,000 in computer hardware, plus maybe half of Quarrey's time over two years. Spreading the system to the other plants, a process that will be completed by the end of 1991, won't be so expensive, but some plants will have to buy PCs, and employees will have to learn the system. Connor's information mania is not coming cheap.
The payoff, however, is already plain, at least for the L.A. division. Late jobs have declined over the past two years, from 10% of backlog to less than 1%. Connor's scores in the annual quality ratings provided by many of its customers have climbed to near perfection. The company's service and quality record commands a premium in the marketplace. An Indiana customer hired Connor as the sole source for several items, even though Connor's price was considerably higher than the other bids. A Los Angeles County customer invented the acronym CDBWGDCS, for Cost of Doing Business with Goddamn Connor Spring. "That was my purchasing manager," chuckles Al Wentzell, materials manager for Anthony Industrial Products. "Every time I wondered why we were paying this much for a part, he'd put those letters on the board. But the quality and service they give us are phenomenal."
The information systems also reduce Connor's costs. In 1989, 14% of defective jobs had similar problems the second time around. By 1990 that figure was down to 4%. Credits issued to customers fell from almost 4% of sales, in 1989, to slightly over .5%, in 1990. The company's overall sales per employee have risen about 20% in the past two years.
There are other payoffs as well.
For the employees and managers of Connor, there's the knowledge that they own 42% of a company whose stock value rose 35% last year -- and that increased earnings will be reflected in fat bonus checks. Arguably, it's that financial interest in the company that makes the information system work. There's a tangible reward for making the kind of improvements the new system encourages.
For Bob Sloss, the payoffs are both tangible and intangible. His family's 55% interest in Connor is worth as much as its 100% interest was worth when the ESOP was started, in 1985. His company is once again profitable and seems to be weathering the national recession well.
Maybe more important, he has the satisfaction of accomplishing at least part of that original mission to revive American industry. Spring making as a whole hasn't done too well in recent years. But Connor has taken on all comers and won its share of victories.
"We're competing with the best house in Japan, and the best in Germany, and the best in Korea," says Sloss. "And we're still in the game."
