Global Platforms Drive GM's $1 Billion Tech Center Investment

WARREN, MI – General Motors announces today it will invest $1 billion over the next three years to modernize and expand its suburban Detroit technical center, an outlay that supports the automaker’s drive to global platform engineering.

“This is an investment in our people who work at the Tech Center, because it is positioning the company for long-term growth by enabling new levels of innovation and collaboration into our workplace,” says Mark Reuss, executive vice president-Global Product Development and Purchasing and Supply Chain at GM.

“We will transform this campus into a collaborative workplace of choice for our current team and future talent,” Reuss says during an event attended by Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder and other local and state officials.

A local tax abatement worth a reported $97 million helps fuel the investment, which will create about 2,600 new jobs on the 59-year-old campus.

Located 12 miles (19 km) from GM World Headquarters in Detroit, the 19,000 GM Tech Center employees conduct a lion’s share of the automaker’s advanced design and engineering activities. Regional R&D centers around the globe complement that work.

Under the current investment plan, the Warren campus will gain new design studios; a new parking deck for design employees; renovation and rebuilding of some existing R&D facilities; a multi-story IT building and parking deck for its future employees; and additional testing areas for the facility’s advanced energy center, where work on projects such as electric vehicles occurs.

The investment also supports office upgrades, a reconfiguration of some existing work areas and buildings, and improvement to the work environments of all campus facilities including the sprawling vehicle engineering center erected just 10 years ago.

Reuss admits the automaker’s financial troubles of the previous decade, which culminated in its 2009 bankruptcy, led to a degree of neglect on the campus. Since the restructuring, GM has posted 21 consecutive quarters of profitability and the automaker has been sinking billions of dollars into its global operations.

The Warren facility also sustained extensive flood damage last year during heavy rainfalls, which played a role in the timing of the upgrade.

“We went through some financial difficulties, where it was difficult for our global facilities team to keep up,” Reuss says. “Now it’s time to redo and retrench. It’s time to invest in the future and that’s what we are doing.”

The investment follows a recent move by GM to consolidate advanced design and engineering work in Southeast Michigan as the automaker accelerates a shift to global vehicle platform architectures.

“We’re changing the way we do product development,” Reuss says of a recent strategy reboot driven by global markets homogenizing around carbon-dioxide emissions and safety regulations, as well as achieving greater economies of scale. “So when we do architectures we want to do it (only) once.”

The new approach will see regional R&D centers tailoring those platforms to their specific markets.

“The core stuff we need to achieve, like mass reduction, safety and CO2 on a powertrain basis, there’s power behind doing that once and doing it for the world. That’s what you’ll see here.”

Designed by noted architect Eero Saarinen, construction on the 326-acre (132 ha) campus began in 1949 before opening in 1956 and today’s announcement marks the first campus-wide renovation since then.

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