ProNET What Others Say About It
Appropriate Technology
(Allan Alter @ ComputerWorld)
I hate buzzwords. They're misleading, they're tiresome, they make something big out of nothing much. But there is one word that I'd like to hear much more of: Appropriate. I hear earfuls about leading bleeding-edge, value-added, value-driven total business solutions. But no one talks about appropriate technology.
Appropriate -- now that's a word we can use. It means remembering that information technology is only a tool, not a solution. Appropriate technology is the right tool for the job -- it gets the job done, does it simply and doesn't waste time, money, resources or effort.
It means not being a slave to technology fashion and saying no to solutions looking for problems. It means using older technologies that are sound and sufficient and avoiding technical solutions when simplifying a business process will do. It means being alert to the nasty side effects technology can have -- and dodging them.
That's using technology appropriately: Williams Technologies, a company that remanufactures car transmissions, understood appropriate when it built a simple MS-DOS-based system that helps factory workers assemble transmissions more quickly and accurately. Computers on the assembly line show workers how to assemble parts with step-by-step instructions and pictures. The system helped quadruple sales and is so simple, a lone IS professional and a few factory workers built the pilot in seven months for $27,000.
Picture This
(Allan Alter @ ComputerWorld)
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.
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.
Greg Allen was the only information systems professional on a seven-person development team....
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.
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.
Bringing In the Users
(Natalie Engler @ ComputerWorld)
In one corner, its the technologists who build the information systems. In the opposite corner, the people who use them. They speak different languages and inhabit different worlds, but they need one another for any technology project to succeed.
A survey last month of more than 300 IS executives cited ``lack of user involvement'' as the chief reason IS projects fail. It ranked even higher than lack of executive management support and clear business objectives, according to The Standish Group International, Inc., a market research firm in Dennis, Mass.
MANUFACTURING SUCCESS
Evelyn Ashe, configuration control technician and Vadene Echols, configuration engineer, Williams Technologies, Inc., a Summerville, S.C., automatic transmission remanufacturing company
Project: ProNet, a control valve body operation
Duration: four months
Number of users involved: five
The project doubled productivity, nearly halved cycle times, helped quadruple sales and resulted in system sales to Ford Motor Co. and Allison Transmission, Inc.
When Greg Allen, head of IS at Williams Technologies, began working on a system to computerize the manufacturing of automotive transmissions, he was dependent on users such as Echols and Ashe for their industry knowledge.
In the beginning, many users were daunted by the technology and feared they might lose their jobs. Later, they became enthusiastic participants.
Here's what they say turned them around:
Once Allen selected his users, he told each what he hoped to accomplish and what they had to offer.
``Greg said I had quite a bit of knowledge about production and what people were looking for,'' says Ashe, who supervised the assembly of valve body transmissions.
Allen explained the technology in terms that they could relate to.
He had them train him to perform their jobs, then he used analogies to explain the technology. He told Echols that the Open Access database was like the thousands of books of assembly instructions she had to pore through to build each transmission. The hard drive, he said, was like a file drawer. The RAM is like a desktop, and ``you take the stuff out of your file cabinet, put it on your desktop and put it away when you are finished.'' Once he presented it, the benefits were evident, she says.
The project altered both women's careers.<p><iframe frameborder="0" height="240" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/HQDwcfTWL5Y?feature=player_detailpage" width="480"></iframe></p>
Ashe was promoted from the valve body assembly line to engineering, where she builds databases for all the transmissions the company makes. Echols says she has doubled her productivity.
The project included a feedback mechanism.
The factory floor system lets users give input to the engineering team. It also captures the tricks people develop as they use a manufacturing station so new operators can benefit from their experience.
The Inside Route: Williams Technologies (WTI)
Robert W. (Doc) Hall @ AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence))
Williams Technologies is still developing its approach to network manufacturing, but even before the idea germinated the company prepared by improving internal operations with simple systems, JIT, visibility practices, quality improvement processes, Total Productive Maintenance, and considerable employee involvement. They also established close operating ties with customers and suppliers.
WTI remanufactures transmissions, that is, they bring in defective transmissions (called cores), disassemble, clean and inspect, often doing an analysis of cause of failure for the OEM. Then the parts are remanufactured to original OEM specifications. When the transmission is reassembled it is upgraded using the latest feasible engineering changes for that core. When the transmission is sent out. it may carry a stronger warranty than when the same core was originally manufactured.
Cores brought in can be as much as nine years old. Hundreds of engineering changes may apply to an old transmission. Therefore the problem is to identify what must be done to each transmission and execute it in a continuous flow operation.
Many of the engineering upgrades involve the control systems-the electronics and the control valve bodies, which are the fluid logic control devices for transmissions. Therefore, WTI began their new system with the valve body subassembly line, called the "leapfrog line," but the plan is bigger. The objective is to develop an infinitely flexible manufacturing system, networked by computer to reduce lead-times, from identifying a core in the field to returning a remanufactured transmission. Eventually the capability might be extended to create added value for some customers by participating in the recommendation of a transmission configuration to meet their needs. Initially the objective in the plant is to reduce the throughput time well below that achieved with garden-variety JIT.
What about the cost? It isn't big and shouldn't become big. Ordinary PCs are capable of handling the requirements at nearly every station. Williams is a small company. Not in the computer business, WTI isn't in the forefront of hardware and software development. It is a leader in making practical use of new technology. WTI expects to be able to adopt and adapt software with a very limited MIS staff. The data development and shake down of the overall system is being done by workers and those who directly support them-no big consulting bill to have a system designed from outside.
The Leapfrog Line
The valve body cell typifies the production processes of network manufacturing. The basic concept has been around better than a decade. The operator wands a bar code and a computer calls up a display showing what to do. Many PC board shops have long used this approach to download a program that moves a spot of light through the sequence of board locations into which an operator should insert components.
The subassembly of a valve body has similarities to a PC board, but the computer system teas many more features than moving a spot of light. Color images of components (look-alike doo-dads) and their assembly orientation pop up on the screen before each operator Assembly or routing text appears with the images. New engineering changes are highlighted in pink for two weeks to attract attention. Optional use component combinations are displayed in various exploded views. The system even allows the computers to dynamically shift operations between stations to improve line balance depending on the current load balance.
Associates can enter process change suggestions at their terminals. Many can be acted upon by either engineering or the work groups themselves almost immediately. WTI's continuous improvement process is starting to resemble an "expert system' with daily learning updates.
Using network manufacturing, WTI can re-manufacture transmissions and all subassemblies in lot sizes of one, sequenced in a continuous flow operation. Because of the detailed, unique instructions for many units, WTI previously had to group work of a similar type into lot sizes so that associates could keep straight what to do next.
Expansion of the Network Manufacturing System
From the leapfrog line pilot, WTI is now expanding network manufacturing to the entire plant, working from final assembly back to machining, and on to disassembly and cleaning. They are on the verge of being able to control a sequence of specific cores and their components from beginning to end of the process in the plant, with all the unique instructions presented to the right station at the right time. To do this, WTI must detail exactly what each process should do. The system is less dependent on "black art" operator experience, but much more dependent on the ability of all associates to contribute to its improvement.
After transforming the plant to network manufacturing, WTI will be in a position to extend the capability it offers to its customers and suppliers. Customers will directly schedule their assembly configurations by signing onto the network from any location. Since the network transfers images, CAI) information and all kinds of text, the next move is to use it to "manage cores"—that is, better satisfy their customers. Those include motorists who need a different transmission, the service shops that replace transmissions, and the OEM builders of them.
Figure 7. Leapfrog startup team members. back row, left to right are Crystal Bridge, Mary Gleaton, Margaret Farmer, Liz Melton, Dorothy Macke, Marie Creel, Sylvia Ford, Sonja Glover, and L.A. Atkins. Front row, left to right are Diana Simmons, Letia Chick, Esther Campbell, Norma Cross, Mattie Stephens, and Bob Scargil
The manufacturing and engineering advantages already achieved by WTI's network manufacturing have impressed customers. However, the business and organizational changes accompanying network manufacturing inside WTI are minor compared with the operating and communications adjustments between business partners that will be necessary to form a network with customers and suppliers. The hard part is vet to come.
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