Photo by David Crenshaw

Ron Rogers, right, General Motor's key executive to Vanderbilt, helped man the GM booth at Vanderbilt's Career Fair in September, along with Mel Stewart, left, manager, Education Relations for North American GM operations, and Diane Sidner, MS'83, and Paul Young, '60, both members of the University's Relations Team.

General Motors and Vanderbilt have had an ongoing successful relationship for some time. The automotive corporation supports VUSE's minority engineering program and the GM CAD Graphics Lab and other labs, as well as programs at the Owen Graduate School of Management. Vanderbilt, in turn, provides GM with innovative engineering technology and quality graduates.
Ron Rogers, executive vice president of operations for Saturn, in his newly added role as General Motor's key executive to Vanderbilt University, is focused on finding more ways to strategically match the two organizations to further enhance and grow this relationship.
A good example of such a match, he says, is the Saturn Site Production Flow (SSPF) project developed together by Professor Janos Sztipanovits's Institute for Software Integrated System and researchers at Saturn Corporation. SSPF is an enterprise-wide throughput analysis and decision-support solution that has been installed at two Saturn plants and increased manufacturing throughput by 10 percent. A low-cost information technology solution, it is easily configurable and highly responsive to changes in business objectives and manufacturing processes. SSPF is an outgrowth of the model-integrated computing technology developed by Sztipanovits.
"We think Janos's program has potential beyond this particular problem, and we are looking for ways to expand the technology. More of our research activities are now connected to university projects, and this is an example of one that has paid off."
Another university/industry joint project involves direct injection combustion and a team of engineers from Vanderbilt, University of Michigan, and General Motors Research and Development Center, headed by Professor Robert Pitz, chair of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt.
To increase such opportunities, Rogers is working with the GM University Relations Team, a liaison between Vanderbilt and GM to help procure grants, identify needs, and promote joint activities. Paul Young, '60, segment manager at Saturn, heads the team of Vanderbilt alumni that includes Hampden Tener, E '91, Mark Reuss, E '86, Diane Sidner, MS '83, and Patricia Henry, BA '80, MBA '88.
"Vanderbilt's recognition as a GM Key Institution," Rogers says, "particularly for two schools, Engineering and Owen, is a demonstration of confidence in the University, a distinction based on academic reputation and performance of its alumni employed by GM."

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