Cedric Escalle

Industrial Excellence Revisited

What is industrial excellence? This question has generated enormous activity over the past century, fuelled especially by the changing business landscape arising out of the industrial revolution. Industrialization is concerned with the emergence of explicit (as opposed to artisanal) ways of producing goods. Setting up an explicit process for making cars has allowed repeatability and scale, as best testified by the evolution of the automobile industry, from garage job shops at the beginning of the century to the extensive global automobile enterprises we know today. Similar transformations have happened in other industries, including equipment manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, electronics, and — more recently — housing construction and services. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Carrefour, Wal-Mart, Benetton, Gap, and Zara are vivid corporate illustrations of this phenomenon.

Fresenius Medical Care Deutschland GmbH: New Product Development Excellence

This dedication to customer requirements is paying off for Fresenius Medical Care (FMC), as it has grown by 20–25% p. a. in recent years, and as its Schweinfurt plant now produces 70% of all hemodialysis machines made worldwide. Key to this success is excellence in new product development, which makes FMC a technology leader.

Faurecia’s Neuburg Plant: Customer Integration Excellence

This chapter focuses on a plant that excels in customer integration: Faurecia’s Neuburg factory. Customer integration is nothing new in the automotive industry. Indeed, the wave of outsourcing that has occurred in this industry within the last 10 years has pushed cooperation among manufacturers and suppliers to new levels. This is due to the brutal pressure exerted by car producers who constantly demand higher quality parts at lower prices and delivered just-in-time (JIT). But more than a (now common) JIT interface, Faurecia’s customer integration reaches beyond quality control to true collaborative problem-solving and even further in new product development.

The Solvay Automotive Group’s Laval Plant: Excellence in Strategy Formulation and Deployment

The Solvay Automotive Group (SAG) has been successful in establishing itself over a decade as a world-class developer and manufacturer of plastic fuel systems for automobiles. What made this possible was a single-minded focus on becoming a world-class supplier of fuel reservoir systems to the automotive industry. It is a strategy that has required major investment in workforce and methods — easily exceeding its investment in technology — aimed at generating greater levels of quality and innovation throughout the plant. Simultaneously, the plant’s production area has been streamlined into (semi-autonomous) production cells. An industrial productivity unit has been created with responsibility for the continuous upgrade of SAG’s industrial processes and for the introduction of SAG’s new products at the plant. An R&D center has also been located next to the plant so as to further develop the plant’s technological lead. The chapter concludes with a presentation of the management challenges that a world-class plant of this kind creates, of which anticipating the requirements of customers in the future is probably the most critical.

SEW Usocome: Consistent Management Quality in Operations

The SEW Haguenau site shows the value of consistency in operations: for over 10 years, Mr. Munzenhuter and his management team have stuck with their Perfambiance program. This program is based on the philosophy that demanding operational targets will be more easily met if management provides workers with an excellent working environment. The result is a site that excels in the pillars of our management quality framework: clear direction-setting, wide delegation to workers, integrated management of initiatives and change actions, broad measurement, plenty of communication, and due attention to employee development.

Alstom Transport Equipment Electronic Systems (EES): Supplier Integration Excellence

It is common practice in the electronic world nowadays: a company develops a product, manufactures it until it masters the process, and then delegates the manufacturing to a supplier. Thus, Alstom’s Equipment Electronic Systems (EES) does not exploit products from beginning to end, but rather puts its energy into complex products and new product development. Its focus in this very competitive industry is innovation. Once mastery is achieved and the manufacturing process has been stabilized, it outsources production to a supplier who is then invited to make further developments to the process, while remaining under the control of Alstom EES which requires adherence to its strict product safety norms.

Procter & Gamble Crailsheim: The Management Quality Heptathlete

In a country where engineering and machines are revered, and where labor costs are the highest in the world, automation is a ubiquitous strategy to reduce labor content in manufacturing. Procter & Gamble’s Crailsheim plant is no exception: the plant is committed to a goal of increasing revenues with a constant headcount. But what makes it special is that this strategy is explicitly built on increasing the skills and capabilities of its workers. Automation plays a crucial role, but it is the workers who are the center of it all. This is a textbook example of how Management Quality across the board unlocks knowledge and initiative in people’s hearts and minds.

Empirical Validation of the Management Quality Model

Chapters 2 through 10 have illustrated our management quality framework with nine examples. We hope that they make management quality “come alive”, showing how it can be achieved in practice and providing factory managers with role models and concrete ideas.

Visteon Charleville-Mézières Plant: Mastering Production

All the plants in this book are lead plants (Ferdows 1997), which have maximum control of their own destiny because they have, for example, a new product development lab. The Visteon plant at Charleville-Mezieres is an exception. This contributor/server plant was turned around years ago by a dedicated and enthusiastic group working together over a long period under the plant manager, Pierre Schlachter, who acts like a general leading his troops into battle. His plant is “between a rock and a hard place”. Part of the giant Visteon Company (recently spun off by the behemoth Ford Company), this plant is a mix between a contributor and a server — for example, it has limited control over new product development and purchasing. How can a plant succeed in this environment? How can it thrive when it has only partial control over its own destiny?

Schwan-STABILO Heroldsberg — Technikum: Process Development Based on People

All but one of the plants featured in this book use production islands. Schwan-STABILO’s Technikum plant, which manufactures cosmetic pencils, goes one step further having divided its main plant into five autonomous units. Each of these small plants is a profit center and has responsibility for new product development and production. This somewhat unusual and decentralized approach has several benefits, such as the proximity between production people and new product development engineers. This plant also excels in process development, as it makes its own production machines and has engineers and operators continuously improving them. We now look in detail how the Technikum plant achieves industrial excellence through its “plant-within-a-plant” implementation.