Category Archives: Manufacturing

Barbies, Auto Parts Hot Off the 3-D Press

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June 11,2013

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Ford forges ahead with 3-D printing of this engine cover

Ford forges ahead with 3-D printing of this engine cover

Companies such as GE, Ford and Mattel are pushing 3-D printing further into the mainstream than most people realize, writes The Wall Street Journal (June 6, 2013). Unlike traditional techniques, where objects are cut or drilled from molds, resulting in some wasted materials, 3-D printing lets workers model an object on a computer and print it out with plastic, metal or composite materials.

Ford Motor The auto maker sees a future where customers will be able to print their own replacement parts. A customer could log onto the Web, scan a bar code or print up an order, take it to a local 3-D printer, and have the part in hours or minutes. Ford is currently using 3-D printing to prototype automobile parts for test vehicles. Ford engineers use industrial-grade machines that cost as much as $1 million to produce prototypes of cylinder heads, brake rotors, and rear axles in less time than traditional manufacturing methods. Using 3-D printing, Ford saves an average of one month of production time to create a casting for a prototype cylinder head for its EcoBoost engines. The traditional casting method, which requires designing both a sand mold as well as the tool to cut the mold, can take 5 months.

General Electric GE’s Aviation unit prints fuel injectors and other components within the combustion system of jet engines. Building engine airflow castings by melting metal powders layer by layer is more precise than making and cutting the parts from a ceramic mold.

Mattel The toy maker used to sculpt prototypes of toys from wax and clay before building the production models out of plastic. Today, Mattel engineers use any of 30 3-D printers to create parts of virtually every type of toy that it manufactures, including popular brands such as Barbie, Max Steel, Hot Wheels cars and Monster High dolls.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

Apple Decides That Two Suppliers Are Better Than One

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JUNE 1, 2013

Pegatron began making iPad minis (left) recently, while Foxconn still assembles the larger iPads (right)

Pegatron began making iPad minis (left) recently, while Foxconn still assembles the larger iPads (right)

For years, nearly all of the world’s iPhones and iPads rolled off the assembly lines of a single company: Foxconn. It was a famous partnership between two outsize personalities— Steve Jobs, Apple’s intense and mercurial co-founder, and Terry Gou, the Taiwanese manufacturer’s equally demanding chairman. But under current CEO Tim Cook, reports The Wall Street Journal(May 30, 2013), Apple is dividing its weight more equally with a relatively unknown supplier, giving the technology giant a greater supply-chain balance. Pegatron will be the primary assembler of a low-cost iPhone expected to be offered later this year. Foxconn’s smaller rival across town became a minor producer of iPhones in 2011 and began making iPad Mini tablet computers last year.

Pegatron’s rise means an end to the monopoly that Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer—has held over the production of Apple’s mobile products. There are strategic reasons for the shift: risk diversification after Foxconn’s manufacturing glitches last year with the iPhone 5 that resulted in scratches on the metal casings, and Apple’s decision to expand its product lines amid growing competition from Samsung and others. Pegatron also has been willing to accept thinner profits as it courts Apple’s business.

Ironically, Foxconn’s cost advantages from scale have waned as it works to improve factory conditions after a spate of high-profile worker suicides and accidents in recent years. Foxconn, in its growing heft as the world’s largest electronics contract company, was also getting more difficult for Apple to control, with incidents such as changing component sourcing without notifying Apple.

Pegatron, which has about 100,000 employees in Taiwan and China, expects to increase its China workforce in the second half of the year by around 40%. The staffing increase is largely due to expected production of low-cost iPhones.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.

The Turning of the Screw

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MAY 21, 2013

Harley's York PA plant

Harley’s York PA plant

Companies’ pursuit of “big data”—collecting and crunching ever larger amounts of information—is often thought of as another way to figure out exactly what customers want. But big data is also a means of measuring millions of little things in factories, such as how many times each screw is turned. That is what Raytheon is doing at its Alabama missile plant, writes The Wall Street Journal (May 16, 2013). If a screw is supposed to be turned 13 times after it is inserted but is instead turned only 12 times, an error message flashes and production of the missile or component halts. Improvising with a defective screw or the wrong size screw isn’t an option.

Similarly, At Harley-Davidson’s plant in York, Pa., software keeps a constant record of the tiniest details of production, such as the speed of fans in the painting booth. When the software detects that fan speed, temperature, humidity or some other variable is drifting away from the prescribed setting, it automatically adjusts the machinery. In the past, says Harley’s VP, operators had leeway on paint jobs and each could do the work in a slightly different way. Harley has also used the software to find bottlenecks that could keep it from its goal of completing a motorcycle every 86 seconds. Harley managers recently determined that installation of the rear fender was taking too long. They changed a factory configuration so those fenders would flow directly to the assembly line rather than having to be put on carts and moved across an aisle.

Harley and Raytheon are just two of many manufacturers installing sophisticated, automated software systems, known as manufacturing execution systems, or MES, to gather and analyze factory-floor data. Semiconductor and other high-tech companies were early adopters of MES, but now others are catching up. Suppliers include  Apriso, GE, SAP, Siemens, and Rockwell Automation.

This post provided courtesy of Jay and Barry’s OM Blog at www.heizerrenderom.wordpress.com. Professors Jay Heizer and Barry Render are authors of Operations Management , the world’s top selling textbook in its field, published by Pearson.