Treadway Tire Company

The case of Treadway Tire, to me, has seemed the most straightforward of all the cases. The problems are clearly defined, and the environment for the “line foremen” is not a very appealing one. Ashley Wall was hired to come up with a plan to improve the output performance of the Lima plant which had recently invested in updating their plant with some state of the art production equipment and was now running 24 hours a day. Most notably, the turnover rate of the line foremen was perceived to be too high. Coupling this, the ones they were getting weren’t poised to move up the chain within Treadway. There didn’t appear to be any formalized training program, and the managers had no incentives to train given the emphasis on productivity. Many of the factors that impeded the output of the plant were not in the control of the line foremen yet they were evaluated almost solely upon this metric. The employees, both the unionized line workers and the salaried Line Foremen worked 12 hour shifts. This aspect alone caused numerous absenteeism issues among the workforce. Burnout among the hourly workers was just one of many systemic issues facing the line foremen. Another big factor was the perceived lack of formal authority to discipline the heavily unionized workforce. In reading the comments that were made, this made them feel powerless as they were not involved in the formal grievance process. In an industry so focused on efficiencies, this process is very counter-intuitive. Also the lack of a formalized training program to grow people from within showed the lack of operational understanding by the upper management at Treadway. All in all, I think she’s off to the right start, but I think there really needs to be a heavy dose of hard education by the top brass of what the issues are, and how they aren’t investing in their human capital as well as they have been in their new plants. However, it can be hard to quantify the impact of a more people oriented experience. The place just sounds like a miserable place to work, and I would say that old habits die hard. It may end up being market forces that teach them the hard lessons.

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