Nissan Says 80% of Nashville Jobs Filled

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – Nissan North America Inc. already has filled 80% of the available positions at its Nashville, TN, headquarters and expects to be fully staffed in the “very near future.”

“Some felt that, given a move of this magnitude, we couldn’t possibly re-staff to capacity until December of this year,” says Jim Morton, NNA senior vice president-administrative and finance, in a prepared speech.

Morton was due to speak here at the Management Briefing Seminars today but canceled because of illness. A copy of his speech was provided to the media.

Nissan lost 57% of its U.S. headquarters staff when it decided to relocate from the Los Angeles-area to Nashville last year.

Morton, a Southerner and close friend of Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. CEO Carlos Ghosn, has been seen by many as the architect of the move to Tennessee.

However, he says the idea of moving NNA headquarters was brought up before his arrival at the auto maker.

“Nissan’s situation in Los Angeles was not ideal and hadn’t been for some time,” Morton says. “In fact, the idea of relocating our headquarters had been considered a number of times that I know of, prior to my joining Nissan in 2000.”

Nissan employees will move into their new headquarters in Cool Springs in mid-2008.

Morton cites the maze of 13 buildings at the auto maker’s former Gardena, CA, campus – many of them outdated – as a key driver of the move.

“Stay or move, there would be considerable costs involved either way,” he says.

Another reason to locate in Nashville is its proximity to Nissan’s U.S. manufacturing operations in Smyrna, TN, a Nashville suburb, and Canton, MS, as well as the relatively short flight to its Detroit-area technical center.

One advantage is being closer to the Field Quality Investigation group, Morton says, which investigates defective parts to determine if the issue can be traced to a supplier or is due to nonconformity.

“In the past, whenever a part problem surfaced, the part (was) investigated in Los Angeles, then sent incorrectly to Trim & Chassis parts engineers at the manufacturing plant in Smyrna or Canton or to design engineers based at our Technical Center in Farmington Hills, (MI),” Morton says. “If the initial guess in L.A. was wrong, that problem solution was going into slow motion.”

Now, he says manufacturing and design engineers can work together to initially investigate faulty parts, “due to improved proximity and better understanding of who is an expert on a given subject.”

The Field Quality Investigation group now is based at the Smyrna plant, resulting in a specific return point for parts; less handling of parts; and problem solving between manufacturing and supplier employees, he says.

Nissan employees, currently residing in the Bell South tower in downtown Nashville, will move into a new building in the nearby suburb of Cool Springs in mid-2008.

Morton says when the first employees arrived at the Bell South building on June 19 they were able to plug in and begin working on their laptops immediately due to preparations made in a relatively short period of time (Bell South employees occupied the building until April 1).

“In terms of disruption, while it’s too early to form a final judgment, our sense is that the disruptions have been limited,” Morton says, adding all coming vehicle launches, including the ’07 Infiniti G35 and ’07 Nissan Altima sedans, are “on schedule and on budget.”

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