IEN: What are the major concerns facing providers of assembly technology and related products and services in the next few years? How can they be addressed?
Fletcher: The biggest challenge is dealing with rapidly changing market conditions and moving objectives with project time compression. The cycle time to adopt and integrate technology has been compressed because of the financial drivers of a global competitive market. The challenge is dealing with the paradigm shift from the 3-5 year planning cycle to a more realistic 6-18 month window.
Some of the ways to address these changes and issues deal with three critical facets. The first facet is a sense of urgency within the management of an organization to understand the new global pressures and compression of response time. The second facet is an accurate assessment of in-house capabilities and strengths and weaknesses. The third facet is the absolute need to have communications with all parties and groups so that objectives, expectations, and desires are clearly and crisply understood and documented.
IEN: What innovations are in store in assembly related systems, equipment and components, materials, and software?
Fletcher: The technological explosion has outdistanced the manufacturing sector''s ability to adopt these tools on a timely, profitable basis. In the field of sensing and measurement, the capabilities and improvements are occurring quickly and the real limitation is the transfer of capability from product specifications to a manufacturing impact. The transfer function time frame being applied in the production and manufacturing sector is still much too long. Leading companies need to form better technology partnerships so that they can begin to utilize these technological advancements in their next generation designs. All too often these concepts are given lip service or are driven by sourcing-supply agendas.
IEN: What are the sector''s R & D hot spots?
Fletcher: As the drive to reduce cost and improve quality continues to be focused on, then R & D needs to be reformulated. More emphasis needs to be applied to the effective usage of cutting edge technology via better documentation, training, or allocating greater support resources to the early adopters of the technology. All too often there is only marginal utilization and marginal impact from the cutting edge technology because of the time it takes to become effective and efficient with the technology. This can be compressed dramatically by using a more European approach to the transfer of market products to the process or customer plant site. This leads to a second valuable benefit of a better understanding on how the ultimate customer uses or misuses a technology product. This often leads to the second-generation developments and improvements.
IEN: Will wireless become more prevalent in assembly? How about the Internet?
Fletcher: Need to be more efficient with cabled utilization before wireless really becomes justifiable. Look at the history of device networks and how they were promoted versus the results.
IEN: Will collaborative manufacturing play a role?
Fletcher: Collaborative manufacturing means different things to different people. In the new global manufacturing realm, collaborative manufacturing is one way to product products at the lowest available cost. For volume based manufacturing, lowest competitive cost needs to be achieved to remain profitable in the manufacturing sector.
IEN: Can throughput be matched to customer demand? How?
Fletcher: We seem to think that this is achievable with manufacturing and the usage of technology. In some aspects this can be met. In other aspects it cannot be done cost effectively and probably should not be strived for as a goal. We need to clearly understand the process to know what JIT really means and needs to provide to every phase of an operation.
IEN: What are the challenges of right sizing?
Fletcher: Deciding what right sizing really is and what does it do for my business. All too often, buzzwords and hyped initiatives only go so far because there is no real knowledge of the relationship between size and intended results. Too often poor assumptions are made and applied to the model being used by the operation. One area where assumptions seem to miss the mark deals with scalability and flexibility. Economic and manufacturing models like stability and good predictability, which is not the state of the times.
IEN: Is Lean manufacturing making inroads?
Fletcher: I think so. Can go much farther with greater investigation and study of the overall process.
IEN: What are the pros and cons of cellular assembly?
Fletcher: From the pro standpoint: Greater flexibility with modular or cellular architecture; much easier to adopt modifications or incremental changes with the distributed concept. From a con standpoint: Greater upfront cost and more NRE costs.
IEN: Have you seen much progress in integrating the front office, extended enterprise (logistics, etc.) and assembly? Please explain.
Fletcher: At the large enterprise company levels, the integration is occurring where they can afford the hefty investment for this functionality. At the mid-business level, it has only been in the past 12 months that packages have been affordable to achieve this level of integration. At the small business level, it is a mixed bag. Some businesses that are owned and led by individuals with the capability to achieve this integration are doing so. Others are too busy taking care of tactical responsibilities to spend much time or resources on future efficiency tools.