Act 2, Scene 2: Restructuring at the factory
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- Direct transfer and its limits: the SMT story
- Hybrid innovation in production methods: the GEM line
- Testing in quality and building in quality
- Employment relations on the shop-floor: the costs of flexibility
| Act 2, Scene 2: Restructuring at the factory
The relationship between British and Japanese engineers and managers was rather different at the factory than in R&D. This can once again be placed in the context of the logic of the take-over for Mitsubishi and for Apricot. Mitsubishi was particularly dependent upon tapping the design and development expertise of the Apricot R&D team, and while the manufacture of PCs was also influenced by the distinctive character of the design and the marketing of computers Mitsubishi management saw it as closer to some of existing operations. Indeed Mitsubishi believed that not only their financing of investment but their production engineering skills should contribute to the refurbishment of the Scottish production facility, though they recognised that there was no simple analogue to be transferred from Japan. Thus the influence of Japanese managers and engineers was rather more evident and extensive at Glenrothes than in Birmingham, but it was still mediated through the distinctive features of Apricot’s PC operation. The new SMT facility, which had been funded by the parent and involved processes which were common to many of their other factories, saw a heavy involvement of Japanese engineers in installing the production process, training the operators and later trouble-shooting various production problems, but even here local management emphasised that the continuing management of the work process was now in their hands. Meanwhile employees suggested that neither Japanese nor British managers had moved far to enhance worker flexibility and product quality in this area. Secondly, a major reorganisation of the main production area involved significant Japanese engineering input, but in a form that was also heavily influenced by sector recipes rather than mirroring established practice in Japan. This reorganisation involved a move to single-line cell-build (at the centre of which individual operators built-through whole units of a variety of models) from the older dedicated flow-lines, to provide the basis for a substantial growth of output which would also have to accommodate an extended model mix. The way in which the combined team of British and Japanese production engineers addressed this distinctive set of production requirements was strongly informed by a range of visits to other electronics factories within ‘Silicon Glen’. Thirdly, Japanese concerns about product quality were influential in the way the production process was operated, not so much directly through the presence of Japanese staff at the factory but rather through the role of Mitsubishi Electric as a customer because one of it’s marketing businesses imposed stringent standards for the large volume of machines being produced for the Japanese market. This led to continuing negotiation over the balance of cost, durability and innovation appropriate for the PC market world-wide, and the resulting quality standards continued to met primarily by rigorous and repetitive testing procedures at the end of the line, and rectification, rather than a sophisticated enforcement of ‘building in quality’. Interestingly the senior Japanese engineering manager was rather more relaxed about this than the British quality manager, who bemoaned the inadequate commitment of production management to quality procedures (Quality Circles, for instance, fell into abeyance in the mid 1990s) in the face of the usual round of production pressures and crises. Thus any drawing upon parent company production techniques was negotiated through a process of managerial micropolitics and alliance formation, in which arguments and understandings about the scope and limits of these techniques in particular social, organisational and technical settings were rehearsed, but this often involved a recognition that established approaches and sector recipes were of greatest relevance. While teams of Japanese engineers visited to advise on machine operation or layout or propose ways of coping with production or quality problems, this very rarely meant wholesale transposition of production arrangements. A senior Japanese manager at Glenrothes, who had been key figure in engineering innovations at the factory, had worked on small business computers in Japan, when Mitsubishi Electric moved into that area from its mainframe business. On that basis he had been involved as an engineering specialist in the parent company’s assessment of Apricot before the take-over and after the purchase he was then despatched to become a senior Japanese manager there. He saw his specific remit as to draw upon the parent’ company’s manufacturing expertise: Mainly my job was so we could get the infrastructure. It was difficult, [Apricot was] a very young company. From the manufacturing point of view not so strong, also comparing Mitsubishi Electric. At that time Mitsubishi Electric [had] already decided to import the Apricot product to the Japanese market and sell their product through Mitsubishi Electric channels. That means that the product should [must] be very reliable. That means Apricot needs to create good manufacturing process. [7] This meant overcoming substantial differences between the approaches of the two companies. In particular, while Mitsubishi planned production in detail to guarantee quality, production planning at Apricot was less detailed and also more subject to revision. He felt that this difference made it difficult for Japanese and British managers to collaborate, though such co-operation was important. At the same time he acknowledged the significance of the specific engineering expertise which had been developed within Apricot’s PC business. However, as will be shown below, the implications of these features varied in different areas of the factory. Direct transfer and its limits: the SMT story So far as the SMT line was concerned, the initial investment decision was designed to address quality problems arising from distant production in Singapore, and was strongly led by Mitsubishi Electric When you’ve got something like a week between when the board is manufactured and the fastest you can get it into the UK, your cost and flexibility start to suffer. So you end up with lots of work in progress ... lots of re-work ... lots of commuting backwards and forwards, all of which got very expensive and quite difficult to manage. ... The first thing they [Mitsubishi] said was ‘right we are a manufacturing company, we are going to have circuit board manufacturing next to where you assemble the computers. It’s all under control.’ They’d got a great deal of experience and expertise in this area and said that ‘OK we can support Apricot to reduce its costs and previous flexibility problems by making this investment’ so ... the planning started in [the year of the take-over] [4] The introduction of an automated Surface Mount line at the factory, together with its associated manual insertion and testing operations, was intended to make the Scottish plant self-sufficient in PCB/motherboard manufacture. Since the parent company already had experience of operating such facilities in Japan this was seen as involving a more or less direct transfer of a full manufacturing process from Japan to the UK, with only minor modifications which related to such matters as shift working arrangements. Senior British managers emphasised that, once the team of Japanese managers got the line up and running, it was then taken over by local management. Meanwhile, the experienced female workforce on that section saw the initial input of the Japanese engineers as important, for example as trainers in soldering techniques and in implementing new procedures for testing and rectification which had improved quality. However, they also emphasised that the older production pressures remained paramount. This underpinned scepticism about the way work was organised in SMT and elsewhere in the factory, because of the constant pressure and also sudden switches in production to meet priorities. One consequence of this was that moves between jobs were experienced as being shuffled around to meet production crises rather than as any form of rounded training: That’s what’s wrong with this place I would say lack of training. .. I don’t know how many jobs I’ve done through there. I could be two or three weeks on one job and then I am pushed on to another job and I’m on that for a few weeks and then I’m off that. ‘Flexible [Name]’ that’s what it is. ... It’s like working on the line here. This company, quantity not quality and I always said that from the day I came in - its quantity. [8] Hybrid innovation in production methods: the GEM line While the SMT facility represented an addition to existing manufacturing capabilities, the other major area of manufacturing engineering innovation involved a radical reorganisation of the bulk of the existing operation. This sidelined the established range of separate and dedicated flow-lines, each involving a classic sequence of highly fragmented assembly tasks, and replaced them with one interlinked assembly process, organised in a sequence from kanban (kit-assembly), though ‘common build’, then ‘cell build’ and finally tests. A key Japanese engineer played the dominant role in the development of this new production line, together with some briefer visits by other Japanese engineers. Thus in explaining the distinctive production rationale of the new line a British production engineer emphasised that: That idea came from the senior Japanese manager, for that method of manufacture ... The process that we do now I would say has been his baby ... We try to go for as much common elements as possible, like common elements within the system, and then what do we need to do to configure it for the customer - which is usually software, drive size and motherboard type, so that is how this thing has been set up. ... What we tended to be good at in the past [was] doing things in batches. Again, [the senior Japanese engineering manager] was very interested in being able to do it on a one-off basis. Because we do it as a one off thing, we do batch products as well ... We’ve also got material planning for a system which looks at a 10-day rolling forecast and looks at shortages of material. The idea is that this common assembly is good as a repeatable thing, the quality level should be repeatable [9] At the same time managers at Apricot, including the lead Japanese engineer, also stressed that the GEM line had not involved a direct transfer of established manufacturing engineering solutions from Japan. Instead it was ‘our own concept’, original to the Apricot factory. It drew on ideas gleaned both from other Mitsubishi Electric factories and, more importantly, from visits to some of the computer companies which were in direct competition with Apricot in Europe. While access to the latter had not been easy, ‘in this country many engineers move to other companies so our people have some relationships’ and contacts had also been made through equipment vendors (compare Smith et al 1990). Indeed, top management at Apricot emphasised the importance of these domestic and sectoral influences, rather than the specific expertise of Japanese advisers, despite the secrecy engendered by competitive rivalries: We go off and visit ... where there is competitive plants ... Go and have a look at the American plant as to what is the most successful manufacturing recipe for PC industry and we’ve actually got those companies coming back to us now. We’ve had Compaq trying to get in to see our facility because we think we have now probably got the most flexible semi-automated facility going today. ... Openness is what the PC industry is about. What does that mean? It means relationships with as many people as is required to get the job done. Don’t believe you know anything any better than anybody else. Copy wherever you can. Utilise and plagiarise is really the only thing we should be about in the PC Industry. [10] Given the differences between the products and markets of most of the Japanese parent factories and those of Apricot, it was perhaps unsurprising that the senior Japanese engineer had spent over two years investigating the requirements of PC production, trying out ideas on a small product line and planning and developing the GEM line itself. In the end this resulted in a hybrid production line which sought to embody three key features: (i) contrasting labour requirements and work tasks along the single line, with short-cycle routinised tasks on the early ‘common build’ part of the line, and longer cycle (initially 12 minutes) more varied partial build-through and testing routines in the later ‘cell build’ area, where individual operators had the responsibility to complete the assembly by adding the customised elements onto each machine to order; (ii) this avoided the persistent line-balancing problems of building small batches on conventional assembly lines by taking the more complex build throughs temporarily off-line, but the maximisation of through put with such varied production relied heavily on tight work scheduling and effective quality control on the single line; (iii) implementation of a version of a ‘kanban’ supply system, based on holding a day’s stock of most components, though the variety of models and the power of dominant suppliers to ration vital high value parts made a classical internal kanban system designed for mass production inappropriate. This innovation had major consequences both for the relationship with R&D and for the character of employment relations in the factory. Firstly the universal line placed a premium on ‘design for manufacturing’ so as to maximise the scope for ‘common build’, and this increased the leverage of the manufacturing engineers in pushing DFM up the design process, with the backing of Apricot’s top management (‘The factory has to be more and more powerful, say I am sorry, we are not going to build that product if you design it like that’). Secondly, factory managers interpreted the contrasting labour requirements along the new line as an opportunity to differentiate the workforce more systematically into permanent and temporary workers: The cell build operators, because of the function they are doing now, have got more product knowledge ... There is a common assembly area., I suppose you can see what they’ve done by bringing in lots of temps, it’s the temps that’s gone into those areas ... So with minimal training they go in and do whatever part of the job ... I dare say if the production drops what we can do is move people back, [move] full-time operators back into the common assembly but you’ve still got those skills. [9] We will return to the implications of this approach to employment relations later. Testing in quality and building in quality A common thread in our management informants’ accounts, not only at the factory but also at R&D and HQ, was that Apricot had devoted significant attention to improving product quality in recent years, compared with a fairly cavalier attitude which prevailed in the early years of PC production. A key informant on such issues, a senior quality manager, had certainly found the general orientation towards quality control at Apricot more congenial than some of his earlier experience as a quality engineer in other manufacturing firms: [elsewhere] there was very little regard for people in that category. I was always fighting production. Production had their agenda; quality had their agenda. Completely different agendas and I thought I can’t work this way. Coming in here that is not the case. I have no one to fight. Production people here, we both have the same agenda. We both have regard for quality and production targets, as it should be [11] At the same time he suggested that the scope for systematic pursuit of quality issues at Apricot remained limited by staffing constraints, especially when compared with Mitsubishi’s Japanese plants (‘We are lucky if we have one engineer to cover a problem. They could have ten. We haven’t the luxury of this ... You need to rely on the experience. Gut reaction a lot of the time’). When he talked about his current responsibilities it was also evident that building quality into the process through documented procedures remained an up-hill task, partly because of the pressures of production volumes, partly because of the added complications of implementing the new production system and partly because of the stringent quality standards imposed by their main customer, Mitsubishi Electric’s marketing arm in Japan. The first feature emerged in a discussion of the role of quality circles: When I first came here the quality circle was very successful ... but getting the time from management was difficult. They saw it as taking production operators away in what was prime build time ... I had a fair bit of battle there ... [but] they agreed eventually and each line sent along a leader and some members for their meeting and they would come along with their problems ... and we had a lot of success fixing some serious problems on the production line. ... But for various reasons that fell apart. And then about a year ago, tried again and ... That worked for awhile and then it sort of fizzled out, but we recognised that it’s like a motorbike. Put in the petrol, start it up, and it will go and it will keep going but once it runs out of fuel it stops ... In the case of quality circles it needs a regular injection of something, some kind of incentive programme, and it’s not always money they are looking for ... and I think senior management should have been more involved ... What’s missing is this regular injection of something. Still working on that one. [11] Meanwhile managers were involved in debate and experimentation concerning the relationship between self-inspection, sampling and comprehensive post-production inspection. The implementation of the single production line coupled with complaints about quality from the Japanese sales organisation had stimulated an alliance between senior Japanese engineering staff and British quality managers in pushing for an extensive resort to separate intermediate and end of line inspection. In 1996 this remained the interim response of the factory to the main source of pressure for improvements in quality, namely the Japanese parent in its guise as customer. The dominant view at the factory was that this reliance on inspecting and rectifying to achieve quality would be a transitional phase. The hope was that, once the initial phase of productionising had been completed and as the target levels of output, three or four times the volume accommodated on the old flow-lines, were pursued, the GEM line would be developed on the basis of on-line quality assurance, though for the time being end-of-line testing and rectification remained the dominant feature. This perspective was shared by top management at HQ though with an important qualification. Thus on the one hand it was argued that: Those [tests for Mitsubishi Electric sales] are slowly decaying away. As our product gets better they are going away. We are building it onto the line ... these people as the customer are pretty ruthless when it comes to any failure, so Mitsubishi Electric can’t afford to have a product that fails at any sort of frequency, therefore they put the pressure back on us to deliver a product that totally works and is one hundred per cent reliable [10] But on the other hand it was also argued that even for this market (which was expected to take forty and fifty per cent of Apricot’s production) reconciling quality standards remained a two-way process because: the Japanese market is beginning to realise that PC quality may not be allowed to come up, be as high, as they would have liked because it’s cost then goes up. They can’t have both. Quality is not for free ... We’ve put lots of pressure back [on Japan] in our discussions [10] In broad terms this captures the persistent interplay between Japanese - and specifically Mitsubishi Electric - models of robustness and quality engineering, and sector-led preoccupations with the competitive features of the PC market and their implications for design and production, which have structured much of the interaction and also the shared debates among British and Japanese engineers and managers at Apricot. This informant also summarised a widespread senior management gloss on this debate, namely that it also involved a process of maturation out of a highly autocratic seat-of-pants style of management, characteristic of a small high tech company, as it grew and became part of a bigger organisation in a somewhat less turbulent technical environment. From this perspective Mitsubishi Electric’s influence ran in parallel with wider trends within British manufacturing management, in a context of more diffuse flows of influence, both of innovating European and US firms, and through the professional dissemination of versions of Japanese manufacturing techniques and practices. What remains particularly obscure from this vantage point, are the conditions under which shop-floor employees, both temporary and permanent are to be incorporated into this management trajectory. Employment relations on the shop-floor: the costs of flexibility While Apricot, as an established but financially vulnerable British company, had been bought because of its distinctive technological capability, its personnel policies also remained home grown and were again strongly coloured by sectoral practices and current fashions, while the need to manage local and specialist labour market conditions apparently reinforced this pattern. One notable feature, congruent with the pattern in other new electronics firms in so-called ‘Silicon Glen’ (Findlay 1993), was that management had successfully avoided unionisation in the factory as well as at the R&D centre. The original pattern of management at the British company was that of autocratic rule by the founder entrepreneur, coupled with the uncodified delegation of personnel responsibilities to line managers. This was the pattern that had been inherited by the British managing director who first took on the hardware side of the business and then oversaw its sale to Mitsubishi and finally continued in his role as MD until the closure of the company. However, though retaining considerable personal control of corporate policies, he had established a Personnel Department even before the take-over, and had begun to limit the discretion of line managers over personnel matters, not least because of problems that had arisen under the old policy. Such a movement towards the codification of policy was reinforced by the concern of the new parent to be informed of procedures, but the substance of policy remained entirely under the control of British management. Thus, notwithstanding the increased formalisation of personnel policy, Apricot continued to conform to sector recipes in having a lightly staffed personnel office which remained clearly subordinated to the servicing of line management. Meanwhile the influence of both sector fashions and contemporary British management debate can be seen variously in the enthusiastic use of agency temporary workers at the factory; in the development of a customised MBA programme for management development; in the somewhat superficial revamping of supervision in the guise of team leaders; in the formalisation of health and safety and equal opportunities policies; and in the limited activities of the exquisitely named ‘One Goal Committee’ (and also in the idea that this might be tweaked into a shape which could pass muster as part of a European Works Council). Mitsubishi appears to have had minimal involvement in any of these policies, but conversely Apricot management believed that they had some indirect influence on aspects of personnel policy within other Mitsubishi Electric factories in Europe (indeed even when it came to procedures for managing the closure). Here we only have space to comment particularly upon the substantial use of temporary contract workers, who came to constitute about half of the manufacturing workers at Apricot during its reorganisation and expansion to produce a new product range aimed at the home as well as office market in the mid 1990s. The firm had employed temporary workers for some time, primarily to cope with seasonal peaks in production, but only moved to the use of ‘agency temps’ in 1994 on the additional grounds that this was a cheaper way of employing temporary labour. Not only had Apricot sought to avoid the costs associated with the administration of recruitment, selection, training and wage payment, since the Agency had taken on all these functions, but they had also been able to bid down the price they were willing to pay to the agency, a feature reflected not only in the lower pay of these workers but also in the cavalier way in which they were treated. Management justified the expanded use of temporary labour in terms of the significance of seasonal fluctuations in production, which became more marked as the firm sought to gain a share of the home computer market through retail outlets, with its traditional Christmas peak, and used the terminology of core and peripheral workers to rationalise the terms of their deployment. Certainly, the ‘training’ of these workers was usually fairly rudimentary, confined largely to testing manual dexterity and ensuring that recruits could get up to speed on basic assembly operations, and many temps performed the most fragmented assembly tasks. At the same time temps were not only used on such tasks but were scattered unevenly across production and inspection areas, so that sharp functional and even spatial divisions between permanent and agency temporary workers (of the sort implied by management comments quoted earlier) did not operate in any rigorous fashion. In some respects such extensive use of agency temps also appeared to contradict other aspects of management’s rhetoric, which emphasised the wider development of a more skilled and responsible workforce. As we have seen, however, such moves were also constrained by production pressures, as workers’ comments like these on team meetings suggest: We started off with great intentions. We should get a meeting every morning. And then we got a brief every month. And now I think [we] never see a visit. Since last year ... That’s one thing in this place the communication is terrible. Even between shifts. Something will happen on day shift and they’ll no think to leave word to the next shift ... Every year they get a review and they asked us all these questions and nothing is ever done. [8] Moreover, in the mid 1990s the policy on the use of agency temps was a substantial source of discontent on the shop-floor, not only among agency workers themselves but also among the established workforce. The latter not only expressed sympathy for the way the temps were treated but also believed that this reflected badly on Apricot’s own record as an employer (‘The agencies - terrible - some of them even haven’t got their right wages. They even got [threatening] letters. Horrible letters. It really is giving the place a bad name the way that agencies are treating the people’). In the mid 1990s, then, Apricot factory management not only followed a fashionable British personnel management nostrum in pursuing the use of agency temporary labour, but in so doing threatened to destabilise employment relations at the factory. Furthermore, while they later explored such other fashionable ‘alternatives’ as the use of zero-hour contracts to manage the seasonality of production, the extensive use of temporary workers continued until shortly before the announcement of the run-down and closure of the company __________________________________ Directory: staff staff -> Contests, Competitions, and Activities humanities staff -> United states army space and missile defense command april 2000 Shiloh staff -> Historic Waterfront Cruise Introduction staff -> U. S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources staff -> An alphabetised list of vocabulary references staff -> ~ la 1 Alphabet Book ~ June 19, 2009 staff -> The skill of multi-model seasonal forecasts of the wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation staff -> Curriculum vitae personal details Download 35.58 Kb. Share with your friends:
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