José Ignacio López de Arriortúa

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José Ignacio López de Arriortúa (2018)

José Ignacio López de Arriortúa (born January 18, 1941 in Amorebieta , Spain) is a Spanish manager who initially worked for Opel or the parent company General Motors (GM), and later for Volkswagen .

Life

López studied engineering in Bilbao before working for the Spanish subsidiaries of the American companies Westinghouse and Firestone in 1966 . In 1979, the ambitious López was hired by Hans Hüskes, head of the GM plant in Figueruelas near Saragossa, to set up the new production facility in Spain. He boasted that instead of the estimated 12,000 employees for the annual production of 270,000 units, only 9,000 employees for the annual production of 370,000 vehicles. Based on a price that can be achieved on the market minus the estimated profit, he specified the maximum cost of each component. With the perseverance of a sect leader, he is said to have made the recurring cost reduction a doctrine of salvation. The core idea of ​​this concept was productivity gains without investments, because he wanted to allow these to accrue to the suppliers.

In 1987, he was given responsibility for production and purchasing at Adam Opel AG in Rüsselsheim . A year later he was promoted to Chief Buyer at General Motors Europe in Zurich . In 1992 he was appointed Executive Vice President, Global Purchasing for General Motors in Detroit . He forced the supplier industry to make concessions that were previously unknown. For example, he set his purchase prices in writing for accepted suppliers for the next five years - falling. His uncompromising conduct of negotiations with the suppliers in combination with his dreaded factory tours led to severe quality losses in the delivered components - the López effect named after him .

Surprisingly, Ferdinand Piëch succeeded in finding López, who had been lured away from GM with an expansion of competencies, together with seven of his "warriors" (as expressed by López), including the Spaniards José Manuel Gutiérrez, Francisco Javier Garcia Sanz , Jorge Álvarez and Rosario Piazza as well as two Dutch and to bring a Belgian to the then troubled Volkswagen Group in Wolfsburg , where the new board division production optimization and procurement for López was set up. Thanks to his negotiating tactics with the suppliers, in conjunction with the 28-hour week introduced by Peter Hartz , he succeeded in significantly reducing production costs at VW. That is why he was also called the "Wolfsburg Strangler". In Resende , López built a truck factory for Volkswagen do Brasil using the modular production method.

Because twenty boxes with documents and some confidential data about the purchase prices of components and manufacturing costs of all European production sites of the then completely newly developed Opel Corsa B and other GM models were found in apartments and on computers that were assigned to close López employees and López few Days before he left GM, Opel and General Motors filed criminal charges against the new VW employees. General Motors alleged betrayal of trade and business secrets and industrial espionage . The Darmstadt public prosecutor's office investigated for several years for embezzlement and violation of the law against unfair competition .

The investigation was closed due to a lack of public interest. After three years of legal tug-of-war, General Motors also filed a lawsuit against López and his employees in a Detroit court, albeit on the basis of the "RICO Act" for treason and criminal conspiracy. A legal battle for several years was on the horizon, until a settlement could be negotiated through the mediation of Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and US President Bill Clinton . Ultimately, Piëch López had to press for resignation in 1996 so that General Motors would agree to a settlement in which VW paid US $ 100 million in damages to GM and purchased components from GM for US $ 1 billion. Criminal proceedings against López himself were discontinued on payment of 400,000  DM .

Years later, the term López effect is still known as a synonym for cheap and often defective components. The customer later had to pay dearly for simplified assembly services in the production of the vehicles through extensive repairs, for example in the Golf IV by relocating the indicator relay to the hazard switch on the dashboard, which means that the entire hazard switch has to be replaced if the relay is defective.

After leaving VW prematurely, López founded the management consultancy Management Arriortúa in Spain , which received orders from numerous European companies. López was seriously injured as a passenger in a car accident in 1998 and had to withdraw completely from operational management due to the health consequences of the accident.

His lifelong dream of building a Basque car factory under the Carmen brand never came true.

López is married and has three daughters. He is Catholic and a member of the Opus Dei lay order .

literature

Web links

Commons : José Ignacio López de Arriortúa  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ For you, Mr. Worker . In: Der Spiegel . No. 32 , 1997 ( online ).
  2. ↑ Suspects at Opel, Oracle and Ferrari . In: Die Welt , May 12, 2007
  3. ↑ López did more than harm to VW . In: Die Zeit , No. 4/1997
  4. ↑ Lords of the proceedings . ( Memento from May 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) In: Tagesspiegel , November 30, 2006
  5. ↑ Lopez Affair . In: Der Spiegel . No. 52 , 1993, pp. 92 ( online ).
  6. ↑ López wants to build cars in Portugal . In: Die Welt , October 13, 1998.
personal data
SURNAME López de Arriortúa, José Ignacio
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lopez, Jose Ignacio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Basque automobile manager
DATE OF BIRTH January 18, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Amorebieta near Bilbao, Basque Country