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Automotive Industry

Eyes on the Future

Automotive Industries, Nov, 2000 by Gerry Kobe

Two of the industry's manufacturing gurus share their visions for automaking in the new millennium. Tooling and equipment suppliers, listen up.

DAIMLERCHRYSLER'S FRANK EWASYSHYN

Frank Ewasyshyn, DaimlerChrysler's vice president of advanced manufacturing engineering, is the motivating force be hind DC'S common architecture approach, its flexible manufacturing system and its state-of-the-art digital manufacturing process system (DMAPS). Ewasyshyn is recognized throughout the industry for his ability to keep his finger on the pulse of what is new in manufacturing, as well as having an instinct for what technologies are ready for prime time.

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Automotive Industries spoke with Ewasyshyn at DCX headquarters in Auburn Hills, Mich.

Q. What sort of changes will we see in automotive manufacturing over the next five to 10 years?

A. Without a doubt our next big push in manufacturing will be for machine and tooling makers to improve. Our intent is to keep the heavy capital side of this business going beyond its traditional life. I mean, the idea that at the end of a model year you pack everything up, throw it out and start again is long gone. So a continued drive for that means more robust equipment, but not more expensive equipment That will be a real challenge for our tooling and equipment Tier-1s, -2s and -3s in this business.

Q. But won't being "married" to the same equipment doom you to the limits of those particular machines?

A. No, because there will also be a new push on equipment quality that you will never have seen before. What has happened with the parts suppliers is going to happen to the tooling and equipment suppliers. There will be a need for much more stringent quality programs and more use of engineering tools than this industry has ever seen. That will help get at reliability and throughput and uptime on these very aggressive launch curves. There will be a real shakeout in this industry and those that can't deliver won't make it.

Q. Are the machines you just installed at the new Toledo and Windsor plants the kind of equipment you are talking about? Aren't they supposed to be "smart" and all you have to do is reprogram them?

A That's true to an extent, but it really isn't the case. There is a lot of sophisticated capability in each piece of hardware, but the user-friendliness of that equipment is no where near as good as it has to be. Everyone who makes equipment will tell you it's wonderful and claim great things and easy-to-access databases, but it is still way too complicated. This equipment is going to have to become intuitive on the shop floor so that literally anyone that walks up to it will understand it and know where they have to go to take care of a problem.

Q. Will this equipment be the secret of achieving fast launches?

A. It's part of it. One of the things that the fast launch curve taught us is that you can turn the hardware over quickly, but what about the skills and knowledge piece? How do you teach people to use this stuff as quickly as you can start it up? That is a big question. Of course, standardization goes a long way towards that, but you also need to take into account progress. So the user friendliness of this stuff is going to have to improve significantly. We need to look at tooling and equipment that is capable on day one of full line rate and just spend our lime teaching people. We don't want to spend time starting up equipment and that is a big paradigm shift.

Q. You ask a lot of these machines. What do you envision them to be?

A. I'm not sure, but the handwriting is on the wall -- we have to take capital costs out of this business. A lot of work has been done on stations with programmable principal locating points (PLP), but they are expensive. We have to find a way to have fixtures that are readily reconfigurable to match the robotics. And the way robotics is going to work is that you keep the capital side of the robot operational but you have a plug-in control that will give you more features with the same robot.

Q. Any promising new technologies on the diemaking front?

A. You'll see more culling right off the CATIA design. I think art-to-part in the diemaking business is real. The sophistication of the software that morphs a design and puts compensation into a die is growing everyday. That is going to be the key on pressed metal parts because you can't just take the CATIA design and cut dies to that and get an accurate part. You need to allow for the physics of the way that metal moves and consider springback. But you'll see us doing that in the near future--I'd say the next few years.

Q. Does that mean the end of soft tooling?

A. I doubt soft tooling will be eliminated, at least at DaimlerChrysler. In some companies you could, but as long as you have a design staff that likes to push the envelope you are still going to have to do some stuff in soft tool. And let's face it, that's the whole basis behind this place is the wow factor in design, so they are going to continue to push us as far as they can. If the choice is eliminate soft tool and take away the wow factor, I'd rather do soft tools.

Automotive Industry

Eyes on the Future

Automotive Industries, Nov, 2000 by Gerry Kobe

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