Even allowing for all the buzzwords, this forecast seems clear: A juggernaut of change is bearing down on everyone. As Eugene S. Meieran, Intel Fellow at the Technology Manufacturing Group of Intel Corp. in Chandler, Ariz., said, "The difference between the Fortune 500 lists of the 1950s and 1960s and today's list is a group of companies that did not respond to cataclysmic change."

Although these all-too-familiar litanies of major business trends and issues may sound more like the next generation of management buzzwords than a description of the next-generation manufacturing economy, it is good to remember that "just-in-time delivery," "computer-integrated manufacturing," "quality functional deployment," and "concurrent engineering" were also mere buzzwords when they were first introduced.

According to the Chrysler Corp., its new aluminum power plants are the automaker's first "paperless engines." Soon almost all products will be developed wholly on computers and tested in realistic virtual environments.

Indeed, identifying and then elucidating some of the important trends with descriptive terms was a lot easier than developing "concrete, actionable procedures that businesses can follow," said Steve Holland, manager of robotics at the General Motors Manufacturing Center in Warren, Mich. Holland led the NGM focus team that studied the future use of math- and computer-based tools for engineering and manufacturing. "There's a lot less clarity at the level of recommending specific actions," he said. "You're not just trying to figure out just what to do, but who should do it."

In their 1996 book Cooperate to Compete, Kenneth Preiss, Steven L. Goldman, and Roger N. Nagel, research analysts at the Agility Forum, roll these NGM "drivers" into a package. According to the authors, the worldwide spread of education and technology will lead to intense and increasingly global competition as well as to accelerating rates of marketplace change. Mass markets will continue to fragment into niche markets. Customers will become more demanding because of higher expectations. Production will become a more collaborative endeavor, closely involving the suppliers and customers who comprise the value-adding chain. Societal values, such as increased concern regarding environmental considerations or job creation, will have a growing impact on corporate decision making.

What does all this mean to the engineer? First, it means extensive teaming of the individual both inside and outside the company. It means engineers know how to deal with a whole lot of people--in a highly effective manner. Job advancement will depend in large measure on this collaborative teaming ability. "Engineers are not typically known for their people skills," said Leon McGinnis, director of computer-integrated manufacturing systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, "but in a people-oriented environment, social skills have an economic value."

According to the study, teaming is the key response to the dilemma posed by increasing expectations in a world of limited resources, and it is at the heart of the NGM enterprise. In the new business world, the report said, no single company can own all the skills and experience necessary to meet all the needs of the "stakeholders"--employees, stockholders, the local community, and so forth.

Engineers will be concerned "not only with your customer but your customer's customers, and not only your supplier but your supplier's suppliers," according to Preiss, director of agile enterprise projects at the Agility Forum. "The reason for the emphasis on teaming is the quality, speed, and cost requirements of modern competition. You can't afford to be working in a decoupled way.

"This is essentially an extended version of concurrent engineering," Preiss added. "Let's look at the origins of concurrent engineering. It turned out that the interactions of designers and engineers are so complicated that there's no way of writing them down explicitly." So the basic idea behind concurrent engineering "was to throw the designers and engineers together in a team and let them hash things out."

What is being predicted regarding the growth of teaming is an enlargement of this concept. "In the future, engineering work is going to extend beyond design, manufacturing, and the R&D function to all functions of the company or enterprise, and to many functions in other enterprises as well," he said. Part of the need to establish these extended enterprises arises from the fact that a company "won't be able to afford to maintain some needed skill sets," McGinnis said. Some enterprise functions that are too costly or difficult to duplicate will be linked to the disparate factories and duplication centers, providing round-the-clock service regardless of location.

In case anybody failed to notice, manufacturing concerns are going to look substantially different in the future. Rather than today's company--a conventional profit-making entity with "management sovereignty" and with well-defined ownership and liabilities, the new NGM company will be part of a global extended enterprise, which the study defined as "a group of institutions that develop linkages, share knowledge and resources, and collaborate to create a product or service." These organizations, the report said, will function in an environment in which concepts of company and national loyalty have been revised, and in which teaming and knowledge-sharing--while competing--are the natural facts of doing business. This kind of collaboration maximizes combined capabilities and enables each institution to realize its strategic goals by providing integrated solutions to customers' needs, the NGM Project stated.

This virtual factory modeling software system at the Ford Product Development Center in Dearborn, Mich., assists in the design of a drive-shaft assembly process for a future Jaguar vehicle.

In the face of stiff competition worldwide, the report said, companies will have to be distributed globally, with a network of factories, suppliers, distributors, and service centers across the globe. Small and medium-size companies will become integral parts of a global network, even if their own facilities never expand beyond this country. A key enabler of this kind of system is the creation of interoperable business, engineering, and manufacturing hardware and information systems to enable rapid trade-off decisions to be made among performance, design features, and manufacturing costs.

Despite the need to collaborate to survive, each company will have to learn how to control its core competencies, even as it physically moves these activities to a partner. In McGinnis's view, the greatly enhanced use of corporate "partnering is not such a big deal." He said that the aerospace industry "has been moving toward increased partnering while competing bitterly on other projects for many years.

"On the other hand," he continued, "these future virtual corporations are supposed to be extremely adept at forming and dissolving partnerships as conditions change--something like an English country dance, where partners change constantly. It's a neat idea, but it remains to be seen exactly how this is going to be achieved." It also raises the question of "how teams--particularly those that extend among companies--are to be recognized and rewarded as a matter of course."

On the personal level, the engineer's day-to-day work will be altered in the new regime. "The engineer will work in the network on a workstation whether he or she is at home, car, or office," Preiss said. "As they say in the computer business, the network is the platform. In this case, it's a platform for interacting with a worldwide array of customers, suppliers, partners, and other associates.

"Very little engineering work will performed by oneself," he said. "This is a big change, particularly for engineers." Important projects will be done by worldwide teams with instant, constant communications at all times, using high-bandwidth video, teleconferencing, and computer data links. He added that the growth in communications within virtual teams will paradoxically boost the need for more face-to-face meetings among individuals. Preiss did note that there will still be a lot of the "old traditional engineering around, but it will be low-value-added work."

The NGM Project said that the ongoing technological revolution giving us ubiquitous information technology, a global information network, and the ability to communicate anywhere and anytime at high bandwidth--coupled with improvements in transportation--has made geography, once a primary factor in competitive manufacturing, essentially irrelevant. "But that is not an advantage, it is merely a technological fact," it concluded.

Preiss expected that the engineering work "will be divided out so that a tangible proportion will be done closer to the market in which the products are sold." There will be many offset arrangements--usually local assembly operations--which are now common in the aerospace business. Home markets will thus continue to flex their negotiating leverage in this way. "Otherwise, engineering work will be distributed more or less according to market conditions. This means, of course, that no one can stand on their laurels."

"In every country these days," Preiss said, "you get capable, clever engineers who understand and have access to computers and modern machinery. Designing and making things is becoming what you could call a commodity service."

If there is going to be so much engineering expertise around, how do you compete? The consensus: It won't be good enough anymore to have capable product designs, for future competition will not be based on the product by itself. Rapidly accelerating evolution of technology and global market forces dictate that responsiveness is an increasingly critical attribute. Customers will become ever more selective and demand total solutions rather than off-the-shelf products. They will require customized production tailored to their specific wants and needs, delivered quickly and anywhere, with no reduction in quality or premium for customization.

"There's going to be very little customer loyalty," Preiss said. "Take the auto industry--90 percent of the customers are happy with the car they've got, but 50 percent will buy somewhere else next time. Customer satisfaction is not going to be enough."

One idea is to promote the purchase of lifelong upgrades based on service information. By developing and establishing a long-term relationship with the customer, the high-added value content of products can be maintained, said Intel's Meieran. "For example, instead of Boeing selling airliners, it will be selling passenger miles." The company will move from providing point solutions to creating total, integrated solutions--no longer delivering just what is ordered but also what is needed, and going beyond current requirements to meeting evolving requirements, as the NGM report put it.

Whatever the nature of the product, market competition is expected to be vicious. As the standardization or "commodization" of products continues, competitors will attempt to break markets into niches they can exploit. "Anyone who perceives a market niche or can create a niche will target that niche," McGinnis said. "You have to respond--quickly--or give up part of the market. The flip side of that is you're not going to have a customer forever anymore."

According to the report, "the NGM company will leverage intelligent processes and flexible, modular equipment to enable new levels of flexibility and responsiveness, and will augment human decision power with knowledge-based systems tapping a rich storehouse of captured knowledge. Manufacturing will be optimized as a total system, using integrated, interoperable information systems to ensure delivery of the right information to the right place at the right time."

A key transition, it said, will be moving "from the accepted tenets of concurrent engineering and product/ process teams to a more comprehensive form of rapid product/process realization that includes all relevant stakeholders." Pervasive modeling and simulation will be a key enabler of this fundamental change in product realization strategy, according to GM's Holland.

"Since computers will pervade the entire enterprise," he said, "the computer skills of future mechanical engineers will be key to their advancement prospects." Holland further expects that mechanical engineering practice will move away from the abstract and theoretical to more-practical science and real-world applications.

"There's also going to be a greater need to have more manufacturing process knowledge and awareness," he added. In robotic spot welding, painting, and sealing processes, for example, "there are complex material issues, timing issues, and spatial issues that need to be addressed. The engineers need to know the fundamental physics of the process. They also need a close match between the computer simulation of the process and the real world."

The need to team will drive the evolution of a new type of workforce that is far more flexible and responsive than today's, the report said. "The demands of partnerships and requirements for structure and control in global extended enterprises, coupled with the benefits of rapidly changing technologies, will force companies to continually adjust the size and skill sets of their workforce to remain competitive. At the same time, the need for speed and innovation requires companies to utilize and reward the knowledge effort of all its employees."

Preiss said that this translates into continuous lifelong education and training for the individual. He noted, for example, that Motorola Corp. has adopted a policy that allocates 10 percent of the employee's time to learning.

An engineer at Sandia National Laboratories operates three large manipulator robots using Sancho, a graphic programming system that tests robot motions in a simulated environment before executing them.

The study focus is also apt to change in the future, with cross-functional subjects taking precedence. "Engineers are used to specializing," Meieran said. "Technical specialization is nice, and you'll need some specialists, but it's going to be more important to have people who are able to understand an entire range of other issues, and who can see through a myriad of factors to decide how to exploit business opportunities that arise. Education and training is going to be needed to create the judgment necessary to make these decisions." Meieran felt that workers with these capabilities will serve as the managers in the NGM company. "They will be integrators and facilitators that support the other employees."

Charles M. Savage, author of Fifth-Generation Management, said that what will be needed are "individuals with the ability to see new patterns and capabilities, who can envision what could be, and who know how to seize opportunities."

In addition, the report spoke of the need for greater "discretionary effort" on the part of future workers--in other words, more work for everyone, if that surprises anybody. All in all, "the difficult message is that people will have to run faster just to stay where they are," Preiss said. "No one is going to be able to do the same job for decades on end."

"Traditionally, we've had very few kinds of companies to choose among," Preiss said. Almost all manufacturing structures are classic hierarchical organizations. "In the future, we expect to see a much wider variety of corporate structures and organizations. In a world of market niches, organizations will be set up to address those niches."

"The increased teaming that is going to be required in the future will require a big change in how management sees itself in terms of power sharing," the LFM Program's Gallagher said. This should lead to new organizational styles that differ in kind from traditional hierarchical arrangements, which features among workers what Savage called "structured distrust."

Chrysler's Kenosha, Wis., engine line uses a modular machine design concept that helps standardize the engine build process between plants, along with all the associated machine tooling.

According to Gallagher, another force for organizational change "is a typical problem of matrix management. While specialized functional groups [of workers] are needed to serve as the focus for engineering expertise, there also has to be a project-oriented group to accomplish specific tasks for the enterprise."

He added that the need to size organizations correctly to accomplish specific tasks for the enterprise while it holds on to needed expertise is leading to the seemingly controversial concept of "optimal personnel turnover rates."

Bill Hanson, an executive at Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard, Mass., and LFM co-director for industry, has been promoting a new fundamental view of the future manufacturing enterprise that focuses on knowledge as "the only remaining sustainable resource that can provide competitive advantage."

Industry, according to Hanson, depends on "material supply chains" to meet market demands for manufacturing products. "Knowledge, like material, is a transferable unit whose value is enhanced when it satisfies a practical need in a timely and cost-efficient manner," he said. "Given the significant returns achieved by material supply chains, it is only logical to expect that similar returns can be achieved by knowledge supply chains."

Another still-theoretical approach to next-generation manufacturing organizations is that of the "fractal company," as put forward by Hans-JŸrgen Warnecke, professor of industrial manufacturing at the University of Stuttgart in Germany and head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA). In nature, a fractal is a geometric pattern that repeats at different levels of magnification. For example, the branches and roots of a tree, the veins of a leaf, and the branched passageways between plant cells all have similar shapes. Warnecke said the term describes "organisms and structures in nature, which arrive at multiple and complex solutions, albeit task-specific ones, by using a small number of self-imitating elements."

On the organizational level, fractals are company units that act independently and are responsible for their own organization and optimization. Such an arrangement creates dynamic and energetic "organisms" that are able to adapt quickly and flexibly to changing market requirements.

According to McGinnis, Warnecke is saying: "Let's forget the details and think in an abstract way about the manufacturing enterprise. If you look closely at the real enterprise, you'll notice that a lot of the activities at the fundamental level are similar." If the approach is valid, fractals "may be a path toward simplifying the conventional corporate infrastructure, which today is totally unwieldy."

Savage said that these new views bring the idea of the enterprise's culture to the top of the priority list. "In these fluid, rapidly evolving organizations, stability comes from the quality of the culture--the freely assented understanding and support for the values and mission of the organization." These commonly held beliefs, he said, bind the company together.

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