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8 FROM THE TOP » CARLOS ZARLENGA, GM March 2018 | AutoData R ecently the purists of the national automotive sector were shocked: the almost 100-year-old facade of Ge- neral Motors’ Gate 1 on Goiás Ave- nue, in São Caetano do Sul, state of São Paulo, was altered. Without a warning or ceremony, the tra- ditional writing General Motors of Brazil that had Always been at the entrancewas replaced by General Motors Mercosul. It was a way of showing the internal and external public that a new and unprecedented struc- ture, which completely unified the manufacturer’s operations in Brazil and Argentina, was born. The man who ordered the ex- change of the platewas theArgen- tine Carlos Zarlenga, 44, president of GMBrazil since September 2016 and GM Mercosul from January 2017, when the new structure was created. He has made a career in the manufacturer from the finance area, and GM has pilgrimed in se- veral markets - even in Uzbekistan. In this exclusive interview he tells how the integration process worked last year, the new invest- ments from themanufacturer here, your concerns about Rota 2030 and so much more. In addition to revealing, of course, your reasons for having the plate replaced. Interview by Leandro Alves, Márcio Stéfani, Marcos Rozen and S Stéfani The man who changed the frontage What kind of gains has this unification generated for GM? The advantage of doing this is that all the bureaucracy that was hidden, trying to benefit from two separate companies, disappears. So we reduce costs, acce- lerate decision-making and generate more interesting job opportunities for pe- ople. It also increased regional unders- tanding: many here on GM’s executive committee already had responsibility for Argentina, but this happened through a person who was there. From that, they said that they knew the Argentine ma- rket, but after we joined the operations they realized that they did not. Several things that they thought were the same here and they discovered that no, they were not, and from there everything became super integrated, and I think it is working well. We always do an em- ployee satisfaction research, and I was a bit concerned about the results as it was a major change. We did a survey in Howdoes this GM integrated production work in Brazil and Argentina? What we did was to create a structure around the operation that already exis- ted, the production itself was already integrated. The separation of operations fromBrazil andArgentinawas almost ar- tificial. How can you separate two coun- tries where we sell practically the same products? Today the complementarity of our portfolio is almost 99%, practically everything we sell here sells there. In the supply chain, we have companies from there attending plants here and serving factories there from here. And generally they are the same companies, global, and even regional ones too, they are often the same here and there. Con- sumers are also very similar. Networks here and there have the same problems, the same need for efficiency, to improve processes, to learn from each other. In fact, what we did was formalize what already existed. Disclousure/GM