Friday, January 5, 2007

Who's number one There were two articles on US automakers in today's The New York Times feed. The first was the result of an interview with General Motors' CEO Rick Wagoner who said he's not ready to concede its market share leadership. "I like being No. 1," Wagoner was quoted. Meanwhile the company is closing plants worldwide and losing money. Hmmm. In a companion article on Ford, the Times notes how Ford has lost second place in the American market and the huge number of employees who have accepted buyouts to retire. It just went outside the auto industry to find a CEO who might be able to turn things around. I think the prescription is "simple" but the execution hard. It's products and manufacturing. Neither company has been developing products that meet real customer desires--in GM's case for many years now. And neither has been successful in manufacturing products at low cost and with high quality. Something I think about often is the role of automation (since I'm the editor in chief of a magazine that focuses on automation). Both companies through the 80s and 90s invested heavily in hugely automated lines. Meanwhile although Toyota and Honda have automation, but they don't focus on that. They focus on overall manufacturing methods. Ford and GM found themselves (despite all the automation) with huge workforces that specialized narrowly. Toyota and Honda were able to build workforces that were more flexible. When we started Automation World, I wrote about the intelligent application of automation. I still stand by that. One of the first interviews I did was with a Lean practitioner. He asked why I would be interested in Lean since he was opposed to automation. I told him that Lean principles were key to manufacturing success, but that Lean didn't necessarily mean no automation--just intelligent automation. Apply it where it works and can get a return on investment--not just to apply it. Kind of like my second mentor in process control a long time ago. He said to "not let the automation run everything, let everything default back to single loop control if need be." That's a simplification, but the idea still is don't over automate or you'll not be satisfied. But don't not automate or you won't achieve productivity goals. Where I see 2007 going is more of this combination of Lean and automation--and the expansion of automation from machine and process control to information handling. We need to look at information automation as a system with inputs, analysis/decision, and outputs (visualization in many cases). Automation in the service of people. One of the technologies that will be "hot" this year and will finally see wider adoption is wireless sensing. Another will be increased emphasis by automation vendors on software connectivity and analysis. What remains to be seen is who will make money on these technologies. Oh, and where did many of my ideas originate? Much more from Toyota and Honda than from GM and Ford. The new Ford CEO just flew to Tokyo to meet with senior Toyota management. I hope he learned something. In the US, we need the "big two" to remain viable. 10:24:52 AM    comment []

Linking people Are you in LinkedIn? I am, but I almost never use it. Recently I was wondering about a guy I worked with on high school activities (our sons played basketball together) and found him on LinkedIn (but no contact information) and saw he'd been promoted to CFO of his company. That's the most I've used it. But after reading this Guy Kawasaki post about 10 ways to use LinkedIn, I may change my outlook on it. Any of you use it? I may just update my profile--not that I'm looking for a job, though. But it could be interesting research for interviews. 7:32:03 AM    comment []