Manufacturing Flexibility in a Crisis
By Jason Fall, Senior Automation Controls Engineer, Veo Robotics
Before Veo, I worked at an industrial manufacturing company in Saginaw, Mich., called Nexteer Automotive. Nexteer assembles steering and driveline components for major auto manufacturers around the world. The facility I worked at had been in this business for over a century under different names, the most memorable of which was Saginaw Steering Gear (SSG). During WWII, SSG (and many other American manufacturers) converted its operations to produce gear for the war effort. My family has roots in manufacturing, and I'm not alone in this at Veo Robotics: our Director of Compliance and Test, Gwenn Ellerby's grandfather worked at SSG during the war, and my own grandfather worked at a converted Buick factory, building engine parts for the B-24, C-47, and C-54 aircraft.
When the order came to convert SSG from an auto component manufacturer to a machine gun manufacturer, the plant engineers needed to design a new facility. Without Computer-Aided Design or process flow simulation, the engineers likely sketched out the design of workcells and labor processes with paper and pen. The existing labor force was reassigned to new production steps (Gwenn’s grandfather, for example, became a “setup man” who changed machines over for new products), and the newly dubbed “Gun Plant” was up and running in a couple of months.
Originally contracted to make 280 weapons at a cost of $667 each, SSG churned out over 400,000 weapons at $54.72 each. The plant was hugely productive, despite the fact that the transition had required a complete retooling of the company. The new production demand only lasted the length of the war, and five years later in 1945, the Gun Plant switched back to making automotive components, again requiring large-scale redesign.
How was this factory (and the many other factories like it) able to change back and forth between production processes so quickly and with such ease? In 2020, it’s incredibly difficult and time- and cost-consuming to redesign a single workcell. Typically today’s factories begin planning for retooling at least five years ahead of time. But Saginaw Steering Gear turned on a dime in the middle of a crisis and retooled for a product with a five-year lifetime in much less than five years. How was that possible?
Aside from a phenomenally skilled workforce, the value of which cannot be overstated, the answer is a lack of automation. Robots didn’t exist. Programmable Logic Controllers were still 20 years away. In the 1940s (until the mid-1960s), SSG had relatively straightforward machinery that was easy to tweak to accommodate a new part. Simple box fixtures would hold the parts and six- or eight-spindle drill presses would perform the drilling, countersinking, etc. These fixtures and spindles were easy to swap out and the skilled human operators could pick up the new sequences quickly. Where excessive and rigid automation today makes retooling an onerous and lengthy process, SSG’s manual workforce could easily adapt to the new products and processes and adjust to shifting demand.
Since the 1940s, production line switchover at SSG (and pretty much everywhere else) has become more and more complicated, peaking during the 1960s when automation entered factories for the first time. Modern high-volume manufacturing is not geared toward easy change. Factories are now made up of highly specialized and automated processes that took months or years to design and implement. Auto parts manufacturers that used to be large batch machine shops are now complex, finely tuned “organisms” optimized for long production cycles and low product variability.
Today we’re facing another global crisis. In this difficult and turbulent time, it’s possible that the Defense Production Act may be implemented to facilitate the production of more critical medical supplies. But switching from auto components to ventilators or medical equipment is no longer a simple matter of swapping out assembly line equipment.
This is something we’re working on at Veo. We want to bring flexibility back into manufacturing by keeping humans in the loop (like SSG did so well back in the 1940s) and combining their ingenuity and adaptability with the strength and speed of robots. This is a very important task, not only for the current crisis but also for the future as economies, workforces, and technologies continue to transform the way we produce everyday things. There is no quick path to this goal, and what we are doing is just a small step, however, I am incredibly proud to be part of it.