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Articles - Publication Date 5.1.2004
Lean, Green & Smart
What's in store for tomorrow's factories? Process intelligence tools, outmaneuvering costly regulations and machine tools that learn their lessons well.
By John Teresko
Warning! Don't begin planning your factory of the future until you're ready to start revising yesterday's presumptions about optimization and efficiency, the environment, and machine intelligence.
Traditional manufacturing relationships -- involving the building, the manufacturing process and the product -- are playing more tightly against each other, often in new and unexpected ways.
Process Intelligence
Each wave of technology "rebuilds" the factory of the future. Today, the mounting tsunami of process intelligence tools is making its revisions. Although the implementations in progress are only nibbling at the potential, all signs indicate a watershed as great as Henry Ford's epochal work with mass production.
Of course, predicting the future is a dicey game as the initial exuberance for robots demonstrated. Once, while on a validation tour for IndustryWeek's Best Plants awards in the early '90s, the plant manager of GM's Hamtramck, Mich., facility revealed a large storage room filled with industrial robots. "We had to remove them to achieve our productivity goals," he admitted." (The result helped make the plant a winner in that year's competition.)
How will process intelligence tools affect plants? Author Steve Brown positioned the contribution succinctly in his book title, "Strategic Manufacturing for Competitiveness Advantage, Transforming Operations From Shop Floor to Strategy," (Prentice Hall, London, 1996). Brown positions strategic manufacturing as the conceptual successor to lean manufacturing. He describes strategic manufacturing as "viewing production operations capabilities as a core competence, having a long term view of the business, being fully aware of all market opportunities, planning strategies to outperform competitors by targeting sectors in which it can compete while deliberately avoiding those in which it cannot, and engage in horizontal and vertical partnerships."
Brown's all-encompassing view of strategic manufacturing includes considerations of human resources, process technology, materials management, product innovations and last, but not least, corporate and manufacturing strategies. He says the "decisions will include investment in technology, expanding into new plants and adding capacity, strategic buyer/supplier relations, the extent of joint ventures with other firms, the extent of vertical integration and so on."
The Simulation Advantage: Simulation software is a key intelligence tool that is beginning to point industrial users toward the factory of the future. Those early adopters are gaining time and cost advantages provided by the 3-D simulation of production processes in the facilities that house them.
Not yet a universally used tool, this digital technology offers the potential of huge gains in bringing products to market more quickly, with higher quality and at lower overall costs. The early adopters tend to be in the automotive, aerospace, shipbuilding and defense industries.
Consider the strategic benefits claimed at a user group meeting of Delmia Corp., a Dassault Systemes company and supplier of simulation software:- "Once considered a cost factor, [simulation] software is now viewed as a business opportunity that enhances competitiveness," says Thomas Wagner, Robert Bosch GmbH, citing a planning time reduction of 40% for Bosch due to the iterative process allowed by a digital factory.
- Noting a 5:1 annual return on an original investment of $200,000 in digital manufacturing, Northrop Grumman presenter Mike North reported, "with cycle times so short -- only 28 months to complete the F-35 -- we can't afford to not do simulation. It allows us to understand the process so we don't do things unnecessarily."
- "Being first to market is particularly important for smaller companies to be able to compete," noted Johann Gurtner of Siemens VDO, Commercial Vehicles. "Using digital factory planni
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"When talking about the future of our environment, choosing between what is bad and less bad isn't good enough."
-- Bill McDonough, architect
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