Speed to Market - getting cars to market

Automotive Manufacturing & Production, July, 2001 by Christopher A. Sawyer

When Dave McLellan talks speed, it isn't about how fast a car can go, but how quickly you can get it from the drawing board to the showroom. And when he starts talking program efficiency, get ready for accepted notions to go right out the window.

How many people does it take to design a car? Not just shape the exterior surface, draw the interior, or establish the architecture, but to do all of these things from start to finish. How many people does it take? If you ask Dave McLellan, consultant and former Corvette engineering director, this question, take a seat first.

"Ten, to do a car from beginning to end in one year. That's all you need." McLellan's concept is not the latest step to increase shareholder value at the expense of employees. Rather, it's a culture change brought about through the marriage of the virtual world of computer-aided design (CAD) and expert systems, and their placement in the hands of experienced designers and engineers. This, he says, will compress the time and personnel necessary to bring a vehicle from clean sheet to assembly line, and let a company increase its coverage of the market. And those "extra" employees? Read on. He's got them handled too.

"There's just so much stuff that already can be automated in the computation process," McLellan observes, "that if you think about not jumping out of the virtual world into the real world more than you absolutely have to, large chunks of time--wasted time--can be cut out of the process. And with this come reductions in cost."

McLellan began his career at General Motors in 1959, and has seen the evolution in vehicle design first hand. "When I started out, engineers didn't want to sit at drawing boards drawing the car ugly line by ugly line," he says. "That wasn't any fun. So the car companies hired high school graduates, taught them how to cut sections, and they were the people who actually drew the cars with the engineers supervising the process." Shifting to CAD hasn't fundamentally changed the system, he says. "Non-degree engineers are designing cars on CAD tubes now.

"So, if you want to design a car with 10 people, some of them are going to have to have fairly serious science skills," he mentions. "And it will take automating all of the design processes that can be automated. The grunge work, so to speak. These 10 people will have to have different skill sets than today's stylist, and they will have to be located together in order to take the vehicle all of the way to releasing the tools to build it."

But the auto industry depends on a "belt and braces" approach because of the costs involved. "I understand the culture and sentiment behind that thinking," he says matter-of-faculty, "and you should put the process together on paper first, pro forma, to see what the opportunity is. Then, as a systems engineer, you can think about going through each of the elements and each of the interfaces to understand how they interact, and why you have to go out and build a prototype. You probably won't get there in the first iteration, and I'd never commit a mainstream, high-volume product as a first step." Still, McLellan says there is precedent for this change in culture and concept.

"Boeing started out by maintaining a parallel process--old way and new-- when it started down this road," he says. "By the time it did the 777, it was all in CAD, and the first airplane was sold when they were done with it. It wasn't at all like your typical automotive prototype." And, McLellan adds, if you aren't sure you're asking all of the right questions while in the virtual world, stop the process and build a prototype to see if it works. "Resort to that only when you have to. The idea is to get all of that stuff into the virtual world," he says.

One of the challenges facing the creation of expert design systems is visualization of test results conducted onscreen. "You can do all of the packaging, all of the interferences without ever having to go out and make parts," he says, "because you already have the CAD file." Yet, often the process stops so a dimensionally representative mockup can be made. Why? "Because you didn't feel capable of defining the load case or the important attributes of the part well enough to test it in the virtual world," McLellan responds.

Still, McLellan says automakers are trying to understand the foundation elements that make up a vehicle, which is a major step toward the creation of a seamless expert design system. "They are trying to codify some of the things you'd imbed in an expert system. It would operate at the level where, after styling defines the outer shape of the door, the computer would determine the structure necessary to make it work," he says. "All of the grunge work in a door like hinges, locks, beams, glass, structures and the like would be semi-automated in the CAD system."

Not only should this speed up the process, making it easier for automakers to produce vehicles that are closer to the buyers' current desires, it should reduce design and engineering costs as well. "If you remember the old shadow diagram," says McLellan, "one stylist affects 10 engineers, and 10 engineers affect 100 people doing the tooling. The ugly costs that bankrupt you occur at the end of the process, but it isn't the guy grinding out the tools that makes it that way. It's the decisions made in styling and engineering that add cost. An expert system would eliminate a lot of the rework that takes place in styling and engineering."