Systems; Manufacturing: Customers call the shots

GENERATION 21X SPEAK : MANUFACTURING
Customers call The shots

By B.Sairam

The manufacturing sector is on the threshold of a new era where it will have to rapidly introduce new products, adopt environment-friendly technologies, deliver products instantaneously, and capture and manage information in real time. The nature of manufacturing enterprises will evolve in response to changes in the technological, political, and economic climate. Seven factors will influence the development of manufacturing in the 21st Century:

The competitive climate, enhanced by communication and knowledge-sharing, will require rapid responses to market-forces.
Sophisticated customers, many of them from newly developed countries, will demand customised products.
The basis of competition in all aspects of manufacturing will be creativity and innovation.
The development of innovative process technologies will change both the scope and scale of manufacturing.
Environmental protection will become a central issue.
Information and knowledge on all aspects of manufacturing will be instantly available in a form that can be used for decision-making.
The global distribution of highly-competitive production resources, including the skilled workforce, will remain a critical factor in the organisation of manufacturing enterprises.

Thus, flexibility and responsiveness will be critical components of the millennial manufacturing framework. Manufacturing in the new millennium will pose major challenges, and the biggest of these will be achieving concurrency in all operations. The objective of concurrency is to ensure that the conceptualisation, design, and manufacture of products happens side-by-side so as to reduce time-to-market. Concurrent manufacturing enterprises will consider issues like product-delivery, servicing, and end-of-life recycling during the design and production phase itself. They will network all aspects of manufacturing and make informed decisions concerning one activity based on knowledge and experience from other parts of the enterprise.

A global, competitive, fast-changing environment will make technology increasingly dependent on people. The second challenge is to integrate human and technical resources so as to enhance workforce performance and satisfaction. As increasingly complex technologies emerge, companies will have to develop new ways to analyse and implement them in ways that workers can readily understand and use. Workers will have to be able to integrate technology into their daily work in ways that take advantage of emerging technologies. In addition, workers will have to be skilled and experienced in several functions and disciplines of manufacturing to appreciate the enterprise as a whole.

Most manufacturing technologies that became popular in the 20th Century were not intended to support user-learning, knowledge creation, and flexible usage. Today, technology will not only enable companies customise formats for different users; it will also customise those formats to contexts, the user's decision-making style, and the nature and type of information being conveyed.

Manufacturers are already fundamentally dependent on infotech, and this dependency will increase in this millennium. Manufacturing companies will have to acquire the ability to transform information from a vast array of diverse sources into useful knowledge and effective decisions. The fourth challenge is to reduce waste and environmental impact to near-zero levels. The goal of the millennial manufacturing enterprises will be to develop cost-effective, competitive products and processes that do not harm the environment, use as much re-cycled material for feedstock as possible, and create no significant waste in terms of energy, material, or human resources.

The fifth challenge is to re-configure manufacturing enterprises rapidly in response to changing needs and opportunities. The factors that will drive efforts in this direction are rapidly changing customer needs and developments in the areas of process- and product-technology. The ability of individuals and organisations to form complex collaborative alliances with other organisations will be a significant asset in this millennium.

The sixth challenge is to develop innovative manufacturing systems and breakthrough products with a focus on the dis-economies of scale. The challenge is to apply new concepts to manufacturing that will lead to dramatic changes in production capabilities. This will help companies manufacture products to order in small quantities.

As we move through the millennium, revolutionary unit operations will lead to dramatic new capabilities in the following ways:

The integration of multiple unit processes into a single operation will significantly reduce capital investment, inspection time, and material-handling, and processing time.
Manipulation at the molecular or atomic level will lead to the creation of new materials, eliminate separate joining and assembly operations, and allow material composition to be varied throughout a single part.
Revolutionary processes and capabilities will be based on technologies that are still in their infancy.

Two technologies that could lead to the development of revolutionary processes are nano-technology, which enables the development of new structures based on the precise control of materials architecture at the molecular or atomic level, and biotechnology. Both of these will require major breakthroughs before they are practical for manufacturing.

The bottomline: manufacturing in this century will be more technology-oriented and customer-focused than its counterpart of the 20th Century. Companies that identify and acquire the skills inherent in this transformation will be the ones that form the bulwark of the new manufacturing economy.

B. Sairam is a second-year MBA student at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering

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