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As car manufacturers strive to reduce costs and increase productivity, launch speed and efficiency become ever more vital to company survival.

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Automotive industry embraces process agility


Herbert Hohmann, manager Automotive Industry, Rockwell Automation EMEA, explains how advances in information and automation technology are enabling unprecedented gains in productivity and efficiency

Throughout our company’s 100-year history, Rockwell Automation has held up its automotive industry market presence as an example of overall industry leadership, with top automotive manufacturers relying on us for their automation solutions. The automotive industry continues to be on the leading edge of discrete manufacturing, and what happens here generally extends to other industries shortly after.

Herbert Hohmann has worked in the automotive industry in Europe since the mid 1980s and, for the last 12 years, for Rockwell Automation. At Rockwell Automation he is leading the European Automotive Industry Team with key-account managers and a team of industry solution experts. He provides his insight into the trends affecting car manufacturers, automotive tier one suppliers and machine builders supplying the automotive industry.

Major changes are taking place in today’s automotive industry. As car manufacturers strive to reduce costs and increase productivity, launch speed and efficiency become ever more vital to company survival. In this intense environment, companies are putting a greater focus on manufacturing flexibility and asset utilisation in order to protect already thin profit margins. This requires new manufacturing strategies – ones that take into account the increased role of OEMs, outsourced manufacturing and new market opportunities.

A significant amount of new manufacturing capacity is being installed in emerging markets, namely Asia. With relatively few cars per head and extremely low labour costs, automotive manufacturers want to manufacture whatever is necessary to meet customer demands and capture market share in these locations. At the same time, intense competition and overcapacity in established markets are pushing manufacturers to produce whatever new vehicles are selling at that moment. This means that the ability to switch to the next “hot” vehicle quickly to capture the changes in market dynamics is vital.

To meet these demands, OEMs are under pressure to create flexible machines in very short timescales – requiring the efficient re-use of designs and engineering resources. With raw material supplies and components coming from multiple sources, and the downstream logistics constrained by tight assembly and delivery schedules, car manufacturers must be extremely coordinated and agile enough to handle this business model.

Machine OEMs and component suppliers also are being asked to play a larger role. With rising warranty costs, manufacturers are using new sources of information to drive warranty costs down to the component suppliers that are producing larger and more complex integrated components for the vehicles. Production quality data from both the suppliers and car manufacturers is allowing brand owners to trace problems right the way back to the manufacturer responsible for the “faulty” components. This will ultimately reduce the number of recalled vehicles to only those clearly identified as containing defects.

OEMs are under pressure to create flexible machines in very short timescales – requiring the efficient re-use of designs and engineering resources

In order to produce quality products faster and more efficiently, enterprise-wide information sharing is vital. As manufacturers continue to tap the wealth of benefits from an information-enabled manufacturing enterprise, they are looking to expand their ability to leverage the value of plant floor information. The good news is that modern technology has removed the barriers that prevented integration between the factory floor and the rest of the enterprise in the past. This opens up new opportunities for manufacturers to serve up valuable information – on-demand – to other areas of the company, in ways that create immediate benefits.

Several major car manufacturers have established a customer Web portal for order entry and tracking – a portal that exchanges information directly with the factory floor. Information-enabled benefits extend into customer service; connecting manufacturing to customer relationship management (CRM) systems accessed by salespeople and dealer networks. Some automakers are also turning the TREAD Act’s compliance pressures into a major opportunity: using the information generated to improve warranty management systems and catch potential recalls early on in the process. Information-enabled automation is even helping suppliers work together more effectively. For example, paint and coatings suppliers are working with their automotive customers to get better visibility into the demand for different colours so that they can, in turn, adjust production to better meet market needs.

While automotive manufacturers continue to feel the effects of a tight economy and intense competition, advances in information and automation technology are enabling unprecedented gains in productivity and efficiency. With the emergence of more effective supply chain execution, better data collection mechanisms and more flexible equipment, manufacturers can successfully meet these challenges while continuing to improve quality, reduce costs and accelerate time-to-market.

Automotive Solutions: www.rockwellautomation.com/industries/automotive