Today’s Wall Street Journal has a special section on “Unleashing Innovation in Manufacturing”. Among the more interesting pieces is a report on Roland DG, a Japanese manufacturer of industrial goods like wide format printers, milling machines and vinyl cutters. These all sound like boxes of metal filled with electrical components that should be built up by a team of workers as they move down an assembly line. But that is not how Roland DG rolls. Instead, they have each machine built by one person guided by a computer that displays instructions, makes sure the correct hardware is presented, and monitors what is done through a networked screwdriver (Japanese Firm Uses a Single-Worker System to Make Its Products, Jun 1).
On a recent day in Roland DG’s factory in Hamamatsu, a city in central Japan, one employee was assembling from scratch an industrial printer that ultimately would be more than twice her size and weigh almost 900 pounds. Another worker who had just joined the company’s fleet of part-timers was making a prototype milling machine. Yet another was assembling the dental-crown milling machine.
A computer monitor displays step-by-step instructions along with 3-D drawings: “Turn Screw A in these eight locations” or “Secure Part B using Bracket C.” At the same time, the rotating parts rack turns to show which of the dozens of parts to use. Meanwhile, a digital screwdriver keeps track of how many times screws are turned and how tightly. Until the correct screws are turned the correct number of times, the instructions on the computer screen don’t advance to the next step.
Workers are rarely confused, but when they are, there’s a button to press that will bring the floor manager running to help.
This video gives an idea of the system in actions.
Here is a snapshot of a workstation.
The video mentions cells in passing and this seems very much in line with the typical implementations of cellular manufacturing. Cells generally have a small group of workers assembling products with material moving from stage to stage in very small batches (often just a single piece). The novelty here is that one person is doing everything for a relatively complicated product. It works because the actual steps are relatively simple and don’t appear to require skills beyond lining up holes and inserting screws. Things would be different if parts were very bulky, required super-precise alignment, or, say, needed to be welded into place.
Still this a pretty remarkable system. The fact that a temp worker can be a productive contributor with just two days of training is fairly remarkable. The article goes on to say that the real pros can multitask between two assemblies or assemble a new item while running an assembled piece through a test system. That’s the kind of labor productivity you need to be competitive in a global market despite producing in a high wage location.
What the article doesn’t say but I suspect has to be true is that this system puts real limits on the design process. The fact that an inexperienced worker can be guided through assembly without ever-present human oversight means that someone had to think very, very carefully about how every part gets attached.