This is NeXTs-Manufacturing-Wins-Kudos in view mode; [Up]
Date: Sun 27-Sep-1991 17:35:07 From: bedney@monolith.lanl.gov (William J. Edney) Subject: NeXT's Manufacturing Wins Kudos To All - The following is an article about NeXT's factory that was in the Sept. 17th, 1991 issue of Financial World. It is reproduced here without permission: Manufacturing Excellence: NeXT When the San Francisco earthquake struck on Oct. 17, 1989, only two circuit boards were damaged on the assembly line that turns out Steve Jobs's Next workstations, powerful desktop computers that can be connected in a network. That's because the conveyor belt that transports the circuit boards is placed on movable supports that absorb all but the most violent tremors. Such attention to detail distinguishes the Next factory in Fremont, Cal., from other nearby manufacturing operations. Goaded buy the Japanese, the standards of American manufacturing have improved considerably over the past decade. Leaders include computer maker Hewlett-Packard, whose computers and laser printers consistently take the prize for quality, and seminconductor and communications giant Motorola, which can now make pagers to order at competitive prices. But it is Next's heavily robotized $10 million plant that gets FW's benchmarking award in manufacturing excellence. Designs of Next computers arrive at the 40,000-square-foot plant over a high-speed electronic link from the company's Redwood City, Cal. headquarters 20 miles away. Next workstations translate the electronic designs into information that tells the robots and other tools on the line which part to put where and in what configuration. Just-in-time inventory management has already ensured that the parts are waiting at the start of the line. Then, Next workstations direct the robots as they go about building the sleek, black workstations. The entire process takes about an hour from the time the first chips are plugged into the circuit board. The emphasis falls heavily on quality control. Next runs the machines for 20 hours of "burn-in" testing, and the workstations are ready to ship. The company claims its machines will fail no more than once in seven years. Randy Heffner, the vice president of manufacturing who led the team that built the plant, says that from the beginning it was designed to combine both quality and speed. His team toured 450 facilities around the world, paying particular attention to the Japanese, to find out how to achieve these goals. Manufacturing, he insists, is not a chore to be shunted overseas to countries where labor is cheap. For one thing, labor is only 5% of the cost of a workstation. For another, designing it here and building it there only lengthens time to market in a business where time to market is everything. Next's approach was to automate wherever possible and to eliminate most of the delay-producing levels. For example, after engineers' designs are transferred to the robots, the designers themselves run prototypes on the assembly line, eliminating one of the most time-consuming pieces of a modern production cycle. Changes, if needed, are made on the fly. "We can totally tool a product in 30 minutes," boasts Heffner. This let Next ship workstations based on the newest Motorola microprocessor six months before competitors such as Hewlett-Packard did. Just 20 people run an automated line that turns out 4,000 workstations a month. In contrast, industry leader Sun Microsystems uses manual labor to assemble its workstations. What this higher degree of automation means for Next is stunning quality. Heffner says that 95% of all the machines that come off the line work flawlessly and are ready to ship. That is about 20 percentage points higher than yields at other companies. Next's robots solder the circuit board with such precision that the solder joint failure rate - badly soldered contacts - is only 45 parts per million. For comparison, 200 parts per million is considered a good rate for the industry. Critics have called the Next factory overkill for a small, $200 million-in-revenues company that is only just beginning to make its mark. Heffner disagrees. He points out that Next can make five times as many computers without taking on more people. Currently, Next turns out $200 million worth of computers annually with 50 people, including the 20 who run the actual manufacturing operation. A comparable offshore operation would also make $200 million worth of computers with the same number of people. But the offshore operation would need five times that many people to make five times that number of computers, or $1 billion, and have to deal with a fivefold increase in personnel costs. Next could make $1 billion worth of computers with the same 50 people who make $200 million worth today. "Our strength," says Heffner, "is that we have room not to grow." [One final comment: This has been reproduced exactly as the article was written. Why don't these writers ever spell NeXT the right way: NeXT!]
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.