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Competition, costs, and time-to-market fuel design and manufacturing initiatives

When you look at manufacturing industries, the automotive business stands apart as a different breed. Automotive manufacturing's sheer size and complexity force constant wrestling with the timeless issues of cutting costs, increasing product quality, meeting ever-stricter governmental safety and environmental regulations, and dealing with the industry's annual model design and tooling changes. Add in the relatively recent phenomenon of mass customization, as the Internet-savvy buyer demands specialized attention. With those variables, automakers are scrambling to find the fastest possible ways to design and build their cars and trucks.

With the latest available CAD/CAM/CAE tools for simulation and visualization in automotive design, the first fully electronic designs have finally caught on. Automakers today seek the ultimate in design tools and techniques in order to speed their designs to market, and most industry observers see this much more tightly intertwined product design and manufacturing as automotive manufacturing's Holy Grail.

"What I consider one of the megatrends emerging here is the more complete integration between the product engineering and manufacturing function," notes David Cole, an automotive analyst and director of the University of Michigan's Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (Ann Arbor, MI). "We talk about simultaneous engineering, simultaneous development, it's really now becoming a way of life-making sure that you really do bring manufacturing issues into the earliest stages of design. And our own studies, particularly in the body technology area, show that if you don't do that you lose at least 75% of the potential for cost reduction."

Even with herculean cost-cutting efforts, US automakers still trail foreign competitors on pervehicle cost, and by a substantial margin in some cases. One way that US manufacturers are attempting to be more competitive is through investing in lean manufacturing facilities. "When you're in auto, it's big bucks," adds Cole. "The financial requirements to invest in this business are huge, although I think what we'll see emerge is `low-investment' plants designed lean from the get-go."

# posted by Medical Information : 2:37 AM