When General Motors Corp.'s Allison Transmission Div. (Indianapolis) began pilot production at a new plant in Baltimore early last year, the company encountered big problems with a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) used in its main housing and fabrication cell.
"We had an inaccurate and unreliable CMM bottlenecking our start-up," laments John Russell, senior quality engineer at the plant, which builds transmissions used in Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks. "We were experiencing over 30% downtime, and even when the CMM was running, the results it reported were highly suspect."