A team led by operations director Alan Foster is also putting the finishing touches to a magnificent new assembly plant (officially dubbed MPC, for McLaren Production Centre) which nestles almost out of view across the lake from the original McLaren Technology Centre, but on the same site.
Foster, a 24-year veteran of car production who acquired his experience at Ford, Toyota and GM before arriving at McLaren in 2005, says it was far from certain at the beginning that McLaren would make the 12C in Woking. “At one stage we had seven options,” he says. “We could have made cars abroad, using businesses like Magna Steyr, or Valmet or Pininfarina.
“Even after we’d decided to do it here – the general feeling was it takes McLaren people to build a McLaren car – we still had two options: to lease a plant or to build one. When we decided to build, we put 18 months into the planning. Ron Dennis had just one instruction: draw me what you need. Of course, we had lots of help from Norman Foster, who designed the original MTC building…”
The celebrated attention to detail for which McLaren Group chief Ron Dennis is renowned came to fore during the late planning stages of the MPC, Alan Foster recalls. “The plan called for an enclosed area 100 metres wide and 200 metres long, all tiled, just like we had in the SLR factory,” he says. “Someone in the company calculated that the 220,000 tiles needed would reach from the MPC to our new showroom at One Hyde Park, in central London. “Then we had meeting with Ron, and he dropped a bombshell. He decided it needed to be smaller. We’d done all the calculations, and most things had been agreed, so we were quite perplexed, as you can imagine. Then he explained it was only a little change: he wanted to set it all on an 18-metre grid to make it 99 metres by 198 metres. He’d worked out that, based on the size of the tiles and taking the width of grouting into account, the 18-metre grid would mean we didn’t have to cut tiles. It would save three weeks of the tilers’ time and save £50,000 on the tiling…”
Foster describes the MPC as “not expensive” at £40 million (his previous car plant, for GM, cost £180 million). Reasons? Because McLaren’s approach is to be thorough with the initial planning then change very little in the build phase: “The plan is the plan.” It also helps that, like the SLR, the MP4-12C is a hand-built car. Each MP4-12C takes about 20 days to build and is moved along its production path by hand, through 45-minutes assembly cycles. No one should think of the process as primitive, however; McLaren has installed an electronically based check system on all key assembly operations to ensure they are completed exactly as required.
Basic engines are made in a new McLaren-liveried plant at the South Coast base of the consultancy Ricardo, which assisted with design and development, but are ‘dressed’ for installation (complete with seven-speed McLaren-Graziano twin-clutch gearbox) in a separate operation near the final assembly track. When more models are launched and the plant is working to capacity on two-shifts at 90-100 cars a week, annual production should reach 4500 units. In theory, the plant could run three shifts (and nearly 7000 cars), but both Foster and Dennis are adamant that a third shift is not part of their planning.
The 180,000-square-metre MPC, a relatively simple structure designed to have the same air of designforward modernity as the McLaren technology Centre, has been built with amazing speed. The builders, who needed to excavate around 180,000 cubic meters of earth from the site to lower and level it, broke ground in March 2010. As this is written, Foster says the project is around three weeks ahead of schedule, within £10,000 of budget, will be handed to the company about now, and its 200 personnel should start building cars by the end of May.
McLaren people are all pains to insist that top quality, not sales or production numbers, is their first concern. Foster talks a lot about ‘no faults forward’ production system, and Sheriff reckons the company’s volume aspirations are low enough to prevent any suggestion of forcing cars down the pipeline. No specifics are available just yet, but McLaren reckons it will build cars strictly to order and that it has established demand “for a year or so”. On the marketing side, Sheriff readily acknowledges that McLaren is entering an arena where the long-established, big-name competition sets extremely high standards. Even so, he sees no need for special marketing strategies. “We’re going to tell the truth,” he says. ‘When we say we have a technological lead, it’s the truth. When we cite McLaren’s racing heritage or say we’ll draw on our relationship with the F1 team, it’s the truth. Our approach is to be who we are.
There’s no need to explain the car to people; they get it.”One remarkably successful move has been to equip most dealers with an ‘open’ display model of the MP4-12C – in effect a rolling chassis minus body. The idea wasn’t part of the original plan but evolved when potential dealers and buyers visited the MTC and starting seeing the built-up carbon tubs, with their extruded aluminium structures, suspension and engines. “They’ve become very effective sales tools,’ says Foster. “Practically every dealer wants one.’ /…/ McLaren will have few dealers, but they’ll be very special. They will operate over large areas and “do things very, very well”. Sheriff points to the unique location and image of the London McLaren dealer, opening in the exclusive One Hyde Park complex, as an example of a high-calibre dealership. “We want to be special,” he says. “We won’t be forcing our volume. The healthiest way to operate is to find customers who really want to buy.
“When you analyse customer satisfaction, you find service is far more important than the buying process. And the main driver of service satisfaction is fixing the car first time. So we’re not even going to risk a dealer not having the right parts. Instead, we’ll make sure every dealer has all of the parts of the car, at all times. The only piece we won’t supply instantly is the carbon tub, but then, if your car needs a tub replacement, it’s probably not a candidate for same-day return.”
Training is a vital link in McLaren’s chain of excellence, says Sheriff. The company has already had several dozen sales execs at Woking for training sessions. Why? Because at present sales execs are more important.
Now McLaren is starting on dealers’ service technicians, who are coming to Woking “to see our standard at first hand”.
Sheriff, always a passionate man, is utterly convinced that once the product is right, motivating McLaren Automotive people in every corner of the operation is vital to success. “There’s no magic bullet,” he says. “You achieve success in this business by having the right attitude and using the right approach. Get the spirit of the company right and the right results follow.”
Article published in Autocar special edition dedicated to the MP4-12C
