Bombardier faced a daunting challenge early last year when it bought the stumbling manufacturing operations of Outboard Marine Corp. (OMC), the maker of Evinrude and Johnson outboard engines, for $55 million. The quality of the engines had declined and dealers were deserting in droves. OMC's share of the $2-billion-a-year-plus outboard-engine market had plummeted from 55% in 1995 to 23% in 2000.The powerful Ficht fuel-injection technology that OMC had developed with a German company, hoping to gain a competitive advantage, had turned into an albatross because manufacturing couldn't meet the demanding tolerances.

The company's production facilities were scattered around nine plants in the U.S., Mexico, and China. Component parts often spent three weeks in transit, boosting costs. As an example of the complexity of OMC's manufacturing operations, the engines' transmission housings were die-cast in Waukegan, Ill., machined and subassembled in Andrews, N.C., and then shipped to Calhoun, Ga., for final assembly.

To start the rebirth of the Evinrude and Johnson brands, Bombardier brought in a strapping 41-year-old manufacturing executive already working in its pleasure-boat division as a vice president and general manager. A native of Thetford Mines, Quebec, Roch Lambert (pronounced "rock lambair") had been living up to his first name ever since he started playing ice hockey at the age of 3. A talented mechanical engineer, Lambert led a team of manufacturing experts Bombardier rehired from OMC, supplemented by 20 specialists in plant maintenance, finance, marketing, and quality control from Bombardier's Canadian operations.

The first thing Lambert's team did, in a dramatic reversal of the American business drive to locate plants in the South, was to shut down two of the Southern plants and reduce production in the third. Waukegan was also closed as a production plant. This consolidated operations and drastically shortened parts supply routes. The linchpin of their efforts was a big new assembly plant in Sturtevant, Wis., 20 miles south of Milwaukee. The four-year-old building, with 9 1/2 acres under one roof, had housed a book-publishing operation that went bankrupt. By concentrating final assembly in Sturtevant, Bombardier hoped to eliminate the kinds of defects that plague manufacturing systems structured around multiple facilities.

Lambert's team started working on a highly detailed plan--"down to the last screw and bolt," he says--to reorganize manufacturing. Team members studied all the engineering drawings of engine component parts and redesigned them when they looked faulty. They found, among other things, that only 15,000 of the 120,000 crankshafts and only 20% of the thousands of connecting rods in OMC's inventory could be used.

The team set itself what looked like an impossible goal: Bombardier was determined to start producing the highest-quality Evinrude and Johnson engines ever made, as soon as possible, without waiting a year or two before reentering the market. The idea, as Lambert put it, was "to maintain momentum and get back in the game." That task was especially great because the types of outboard engines Bombardier makes have to be more durable than automobile engines. George Broughton, director of outboard engineering, notes that while you typically operate your car engine at one-fifth of available power, an outboard engine has to be able to run at full power for hundreds of hours. Depending on size, the new Evinrude and Johnson engines sell for $1,000 to $17,000.

In March 2001, Bombardier said it wanted to be building its new engines by the fall. "Our competitors said there was no way we could pull it off," recalls Lambert. The competitors, which include Mercury Marine, a division of Brunswick Corp., and Japanese manufacturers Yamaha and Honda, didn't reckon on Bombardier's ability to execute its plan with military precision. Even as big printing presses were auctioned off and moved out of the Sturtevant building in the early morning hours of June 21, 200l, trailer trucks carrying production machines weighing up to ten tons each from the closed Southern plants were approaching.

The Sturtevant facility, on which Bombardier has spent $50 million, would delight any manufacturing engineer who dreams of starting up a brand-new factory. "We had the luxury of having all the data, all the records of the really good practices, and an awareness of the areas where we could improve," says Frank Bailey, director of operations at Sturtevant and a 20-year veteran with OMC, whom Lambert calls "the mastermind" of the changeover.

Even as they were preparing to lift manufacturing to new heights, Lambert and his associates were assembling a brand-new workforce for the plant. They got 6,000 applications for the 300 openings. Aided by professional labor consultants, they carefully selected workers whom they considered "team players" with problem-solving skills, rather than looking first at prior work experience such as engine assembly.

The foremost aim of the Lambert team was uncompromising emphasis on quality control. The quality effort starts with careful inspection of parts received from suppliers. Once parts pass inspection, they move down two separate assembly lines. One is for engine blocks that become powerheads--an equivalent of an auto engine minus the transmission--and the other is for the outboard's midsection and gearcase.

On a line called Turnaround, engine assemblies travel inside carriers with electromagnetic cards that store data. Bombardier chose the cards over bar codes because bar codes can sometimes get erased. Turnaround directs the assembly of powerheads by setting off computer signals that tell the assembly line to start building the correct powerhead to match up with a particular lower unit--an important matter, since the engines come in eight different versions. The two lines, powerhead and lower engine, eventually come together, but not until the lower engine components pass through an ultramodern paint shop for chromate conversion. This is a chemical process that converts the surface of the aluminum casting to aluminum oxide, which forms a tight molecular barrier against corrosion by seawater.

All along the way, quality control reigns. Each assembler spends as much as 20% of his or her time making sure the prior operation was done properly. This idea was borrowed from Bombardier's sports-boat operations. At every fourth or fifth assembly station, the assembled structure is taken aside and fully inspected. Checking whether assembly was performed to specifications was something OMC didn't do.

To further ensure quality, Bombardier brought in-house a crucial operation formerly performed by a supplier: precision manufacture of the tiny fuel-nozzle housing and the Ficht fuel-injection needle. To make those parts, Bombardier invested in two precision-grinding machines, each costing $1 million. The Ficht technology, which got an undeserved black eye during the last years of OMC, now works perfectly.

Assembled engines are put through a "hot" test in one of the 12 computer-controlled water tanks inside the plant. Each engine roars for 15 minutes, its propeller spinning at full speed--the only such complete tests in the industry. To top it all off, once a day a randomly selected engine, already packed for shipping, is taken out of its box and inspected at 250 points for fit and finish and workmanship. The engine is then attached to a boat and taken out for a test run on Lake Michigan or a nearby smaller lake.

The Sturtevant plant, which completed its first engine on Sept. 26 and started shipping a few weeks later, is already paying off handsomely for Bombardier. Impressed by high quality, dealers are flocking back. The company has re-enrolled 3,800 of the original 4,600. Bombardier now offers a three-year warranty on its engines, the longest in the industry, and says they outperform competitors' products in tests. Plans call for further improvements in manufacturing flow and major expansion at the Sturtevant plant, to boost production to as many as 60,000 engines a year, nine times the current rate. As they would say in Montreal, the start at Sturtevant has been a renaissance exceptionnelle.