WWYD Cessna
"Cessna Skyhawk" has special meaning for anyone who learns to fly with it-and Cessna is a storied name in aviation. It had $1 billion in sales in the 1980s, and then, in one of the worst downturns in the history of aviation business, nearly went out of business over the next decade and a half. Cessna's sales of piston-engine planes, like the Skyhawk, eventually dropped to just 600

units. Even layoffs could not stop losses, so Cessna stopped making piston-engine planes altogether. However, after the economy improved and the U.S. government approved the General Aviation Revitalization Act (barring product liability lawsuits on planes older than 18 years), which would keep prices down, Cessna started building Skyhawks again.

One advantage of starting over is that you get to design the entire production facility, from its location to the new workers to the suppliers. For instance, Cessna does most of its production in Wichita, Kansas. But Wichita mostly produces a small number of highly customized jets each year, just the opposite of high numbers of standardized, single-engine planes. So the new single-engine plane factory was located in nearby Independence, Kansas. A more radical step, especially for a conservative-minded company like Cessna, was the decision to use teams to assemble Skyhawks rather than the traditional production line. In an incredible departure from the engineering-based standards in which the motions of every worker on the assembly line are studied for time, cost, and efficiency implications, production teams would be completely responsible for assembling the planes, for costs, and for quality.
In selecting workers to team-build the Skyhawk, Cessna focused exclusively on team skills. If tests indicated that you weren't a "team player" with an aptitude and willingness to take on responsibility and work with others, Cessna didn't hire you. However, Cessna had trouble finding experienced manufacturing workers. In fact, most of the people Cessna hired to work in the plant had never worked in a manufacturing setting before. In terms of team level, the average ability on a team, Cessna's production teams were extraordinarily good in terms of being strong team players, but extraordinarily bad in terms of manufacturing experience. Cessna was hoping it could quickly train its workers in manufacturing, but that took much longer than expected. For instance, Cessna hoped to produce 1,000 single-engine planes in the factory's first year. But due to worker inexperience, it only produced 360 planes that year. It took four years to reach the annual goal.
Cessna's single-engine production teams had no experience, so the company brought in 60 retirees who had built Skyhawks before. These mentors worked with teams, gradually instilling confidence, and increasing production speed without sacrificing quality, such that they could also refocus on learning how to resolve team conflict, solve problems, and increase flexibility. Eventually, Cessna's production teams will be highly skilled at manufacturing and teamwork. However, with teams taking nearly twice as long as planned to build each single-engine plane, it will be some time before the plant is profitable. Clearly, teams take time.
When Cessna chose a team approach at its Independence factory, its goal was to change from a "people-blaming" culture to a "process-oriented" culture, in which teams would have much more authority, and would own and control their work. Now, rather than engineers deciding the "standard" time that it takes to complete a task, teams decide the standard.
Besides production teams, Cessna also used teams in purchasing. In particular, it created commodity teams with workers from seven different areas: purchasing, manufacturing engineering, quality engineering, product design engineering, reliability engineering, product support, and finance. Each commodity team created strategic plans dealing with make versus buy decisions, sourcing (who to buy from), plant and quality improvements, and training suppliers to reduce costs and increase quality. For example, Cessna has long been one of the most vertically integrated aviation manufacturers, meaning that it has typically produced most of the parts for its planes, rather than buying those parts from suppliers. However, because of the new commodities teams, it began reexamining that strategy. When the new commodities teams examined make versus buy decisions, they looked at every major category of parts, from engines, to wings, to electronics, and took a hard look at Cessna's areas of expertise and production capabilities. In the end, they came up with groups of parts that could be completely outsourced to suppliers at a lower cost and higher quality. Thus, Cessna got rid of its aluminum shearing division, and now pays less to buy aluminum precut to its rigorous specifications directly from Alcoa.

Refer to WWYD Cessna. The new commodities teams at Cessna are an example of_____teams.
A) a-type
B) virtual
C) project
D) modular
E) cross-functional

E