Innovate
One of the other keys for manufacturers to find success this year is to focus on innovation.
“That’s the trick today — cut costs but don’t cut innovation because innovation is the path toward future profitability,” Burkland says.
Giorgio Rizzoni can explain why innovation is so critical. Rizzoni is the Ford Motor Co. chair in electromechancial systems, as well as a professor of mechanical and electrical engineering and director and senior fellow for the Center for Automotive Research at The Ohio State University. He says that if you and a friend have the same laptop, in theory, you both have the same battery in that laptop, even though you could each get a different capacity out of that battery.
“You sort of adapt to whatever you have,” Rizzoni says. “It doesn’t matter, from a consumer perspective, that that one battery in your computer or cell phone has whatever performance it has, and if the variability is plus or minus 10 percent, who’s going to tell, right?”
While it may not matter in electronics like your laptop or your cell phone, it does make a big difference in larger items where batteries are needed, such as electric cars. In one of those, you have hundreds or thousands of battery cells.
“Some of them can range up to $15,000 a pack,” says Suresh Babu, associate professor for materials science and engineering and director of the NSF Center for Integrative Materials Joining Science for Energy Applications at The Ohio State University. “A pack means many batteries in it. That means you have to make sure these batteries last longer.”
And that’s where innovation is critical. If you have that 10 percent variability in those batteries, it makes a huge difference and is a serious liability to the car and its cost of maintenance.
“There’s an old adage that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” Rizzoni says. … “There’s an analogy there — if you have weaker cells, they will bring down the body of the entire battery pack so the ability to manufacture cells with a high degree of repeatability and quality is a very important thing.”
Improvements to these batteries aren’t happening on an annual basis either — they’re changing monthly. And the saying is that as the automobile industry goes, so does the rest of manufacturing go, and the auto industry is innovating at a rapid pace, so by rule, the rest of manufacturers will be, as well.
But innovation in the automobile industry will go beyond making better batteries. As it strives to reduce the mass of its vehicles, it’s looking for lighter-weight materials to help, and finding lighter materials will also help other manufacturers.
“The more you’re able to find new ways, lighter ways, more resilient ways, more flexible ways, more whatever the characteristics of the materials, that leads to opportunities in product innovation,” Burkland says.
Rizzoni says some of the new materials that are getting implemented in automobile manufacturing are plastics, aluminum, magnesium and high-strength steel. But new materials also mean more changes in the industry.
“One of the challenges that has surfaced when you start working with similar materials is that now you’re trying to join a piece of plastic to a piece of steel, for example, so joining techniques become, possibly, a real challenge,” Rizzoni says.
This is where you have to look at what you traditionally do and throw it out the window. Kevin Arnold is the business development manager for advanced energy for the EWI Energy Center, which helps manufacturers in the energy sector and other industries improve their productivity, time to market and profitability through new, innovative technologies. He says, for example, that if GM built every battery for its electric vehicles to Six Sigma standards, which for years was the gold standard of quality, none of the cars would run, because they would all have bad welds in them.
“You’ve got to get so many decimal places out of quality,” Arnold says. “This is a challenge. That’s part of the growing pains we’re seeing now is that what was considered good enough for many years is now not quite good enough, so it’s looking at the fundamentals, understanding and controlling them and ongoing monitoring to ensure that you’re within limits.”
Look at the processes in your organization and find ways to make them better — even if it’s something that’s been the same way for decades.
“What manufacturers have to be open to is don’t take processes that seem simple, like welding, for granted,” Arnold says. “Welding is a fundamental manufacturing process that’s been around for 100 years, but it’s often one of the least understood processes and one of the first that could go out of control and cause problems. Ensuring that they have the right expertise on staff to look at their processes, understand the variables and understand that what they’re doing is with increasing levels of scrutiny.”
The experts recognize that the money is likely not there in your organization for you to throw out your assembly line and start with something newer and better though, so that’s why they’re working to help manufacturers find ways to cost-effectively innovate.
“All of [the processes] have to be mature,” Babu says. “Mature means not only from the science aspect but also from the industry aspect — how can we implement them in an existing manufacturing line. That’s the biggest challenge.”
But it’s a challenge worth exploring because the way to succeed this year is to push your product and process innovation efforts to the limits.
Resources: Center for Automotive Research — The Ohio State University, (614) 688-3856 or car.osu.edu; EWI Energy Center, (614) 688-5000 or ewienergycenter.com; The Maxine Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University, (216) 687-2000 or urban.csuohio.edu; Michigan Manufacturers’ Association, (800) 253-9039 or www.mma-net.org; NSF Center for Integrative Materials Joining Science for Energy Applications — The Ohio State University, (614) 247-0001 or www.matsceng.ohio-state.edu/faculty/babu; The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association, (800) 662-4463 or www.ohiomfg.com; PVS Chemicals Inc., (313) 921-1200 or www.pvschemicals.com
