Manufacturing dexterity is emerging as a key strategic advantage in the automotive industry. For example, Honda Motor Co. can stop a manufacturing line producing Civics, install new hand-like robotic welders and five minutes later begin production of CR-V crossovers. But as a September Wall Street Journal article
explained, U.S. automotive companies are just now getting around to retooling flexible manufacturing plants. Ford still takes weeks and millions of dollars to switch model production, the WSJ reports, and GM is currently retooling a Lordstown, Ohio, plant to produce a new model at a cost of $350 million.
How and why did the Big Three miss such an important strategic innovation in the industry? No doubt there were multiple factors, with insularity, mismanagement and union labor restrictions probably among them. But as Congress readies an auto bailout package and the industry contemplates its future, it's worth noting that competitive intelligence techniques such as patent mapping and analysis could also have probably helped avoid the current situation. The tools for mapping the patenting efforts of competitors have been available for years. A high-level, retrospective look at the automotive space related to flexible manufacturing systems shows that the Japanese automakers were starting to develop robotic technology key to implementing FMS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For instance, a 1991 Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. patent provides an FMS system for assembling various types of vehicle bodies. A 1993 Toyota Motor Corp. application describes a robot arm with a force sensor. A Toyota application published in 1996 describes an image pickup robot device. Yet another Japanese application filed in 1986 by Fanuc Ltd. describes a safety joint for a robot hand.
The tools for developing and tracking this kind of innovation were and are available to all the U.S. automobile manufactures. As industry leaders get on with the task of building the new model General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Chrysler LLC companies, this is a warning light they would do well to put on their dashboards. -
Thomas Blailock
Tom Blailock (Thomas.blailock@verizon.net) is a competitive intelligence specialist.
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