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Build a system that shows workers how to do complex tasks quickly, and you can gain competitive advantage. Just ask the folks at Williams Technologies.

BY Allan E. ALTER

Talk about luck. If you can call an inexpensive system that has helped quadruple sales luck.

Jeff Anderson, president and general manager of a small, privately held manufacturing firm called Williams Technologies, Inc., had a dream. He wanted to turn his Summerville S.C. plant, where workers take apart, clean and rebuild car and truck transmissions, into a flexible factory.

His vision is one every manufacturing executive in the world would like to achieve; to produce more varieties of products - in any quantity and do it more quickly and accurately them before. Achieve it, and he'd have a great story to tell potential clients, Anderson thought.

Creating such a factory was no small feat. Each transmission has about 1,000 parts, which can be assembled in dozens of ways. Workers spent up to 53% of their time looking up assembly instructions in loose leaf binders, Anderson says.

Anderson had envisioned a solution: computer workstations with instructions for building many different transmissions. But it remained just a vision.

Then, because their daughters were friends, he invited Greg Allen and his family over for a barbecue. While the fajitas sizzled, Anderson described his dream system to Allen, a former photocopier salesman who taught himself programming, went into computer sales and opened a small custom software development shop. Allen said he'd come up with something and returned a month later with a working prototype.

It was a "Eureka!" moment, Anderson recalls. He had "tripped across technologies that were exactly what I had in mind and somebody who could pull it off," he says. Anderson quickly brought in Allen as a consultant.

Allen was the only information systems professional on a seven-person development team. The first manufacturing line using the ProNet system went operational six months later. It went into widespread use a year later.

The system is remarkably inexpensive. Total cost for the pilot $27,000, including $15,000 for 10 workstations. The system has grown but still runs on inexpensive software and equipment (see 'The technical details" at right). The entire support staff consists of Allen, who is now a full-time Williams employee, and the one other member of Williams' IS department.

Did the system Allen helped create live up to Anderson's dream? "No question about that," says Anderson, who provided the following facts:

Productivity: In two months, the ProNet pilot, a control valve body operation, was producing twice as many control valves with the same number of people. Today, Williams builds 450 transmissions a day, two times more than it did a year ago.

Flexibility: ProNet has enabled its work force to produce many different transmission models in any quantity on one remanufacturing line. The biggest limitation appears to be the three months it takes to write and photograph instructions for a transmission. One customer vouches for the flexibility claims. "With ProNet have the capability of going in and rebalancing their people and output. They can respond to our schedules much quicker," says Al Baumgart, a senior systems analyst at the Allison Transmission division of General Motors Corp. in Indianapolis.

Speed: Cycle times have shortened. The average assembly time for all subassemblies and final assemblies has decreased from 150 seconds to 90 seconds.

Growth: Besides the increase in sales, the number of employees has grown from 220 to more than 500. Williams Technologies has gone from one major customer - General Motors - to seven. They include Ford Motor Co., Mazda Motor Co., Hyundai Motor, Nissan Motor Co., Honda Motor Co. and Caterpillar, Inc. All work for GM and Nissan is done on ProNet, and Ford transmissions soon will be remanufactured using ProNet.

Ford, like GM, was impressed enough by ProNet to buy the system and launch its own pilot. "We saw how dramatically [ProNet] improved their operations," says Mark Femminaneo, an assembly and test engineer at Ford's transmission and new products center in Livonia, Mich.

Because their facilities don't produce as many different transmissions as Williams, Femminaneo and Baumgart say a system such as ProNet probably makes the most sense as a training aid for them. But for managers who need to increase productivity and flexibility simultaneously, two lessons stick out: even low cost computers can make great just-in-time instruction manuals, and rub a rabbit's foot before your dinner guests arrive. You might get lucky.

Alter is Computerworld's senior editor, Managing.
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