Executive Summary:

The report of the plant manager for RIO BRAVO IV, a subsidiary of Packed Electrical a division of General Motors identifies mistakes made by top management. These mistakes clearly indicate top management failure to use project management principles in starting up a new manufacturing branch. It also points out the learning outcomes when good efforts are placed at the right places and with the right human talent employed. In the new economy organizations have to focus on the customer, environment and its resources and change their approach in doing business (paradigm shift). Senior management has to give clear goals and utilize the Total Quality Management (TQM) philosophy.
Failure by top managed clearly state the objective of the project meant that it had no master plan and schedule. When the project was initiated the objective was to gain worldwide respect not to satisfy a customer and let the respect follow as an outcome. Top management failure is more evident through lack of proper feasibility study on the location and the customer getting customer Users Requirements Specifications (URS).

There was no plan in place as such the project team did not exist at all. The machines were hastily installed; lay out set as per other factories not designed to cater for this customer. The location was never considered as what effect it might cause to the customer. Top management did not address the diversity issue an as a result communication was hampered by language differences. They took it for granted that the business ethics were the same through even in Japan. The type of customer, the location and workers were not included in their operations strategy, there is always a difficultly in addressing a global customer remotely business ethics differ throughout the globe. The Japanese customer was not consulted an assumption was made on what their