Case produces highly engineered products--
combines, tractors, agriculture systems, loader backhoes,
wheel loaders, excavators, highly engineered products--and
it does it in a very capital-intensive environment.
Case, in our industry, has a history of poor product
launches. That means product modification programs, that
means warranty bills, that means safety recalls, and it's
not unique to Case. So in '94 we decided to change, and it
was top down change that enlisted everyone. Right down to
the factory floor. You can characterize the “before” process
as an engineering process; they would release parts for
prototypes, they would test them, and they would fix them as
they broke, and then as they approached the launch date they
would release these to manufacturing. They may or may not
have been ready for production, but there was enormous
pressure to release.The change is very simple. We don't even do engineering. We do integrated cost development. Which means marketing, product management, manufacturing engineering as one team using tools to create a product to delight customers. Multifunction team working together. We develop specifications using quality function deployment, we go into a design process where we create a model of the product, a computer model of the product. We release it directly to manufacturing. There's very little engineering prototype work. The prototypes are fabricated by manufacturing personnel, usually the people who run the plant. Those products go into test; as we find out what the defects are, what the failures are, we go back to the model, we just don't go out and put another fix in. We go back and find out what's wrong with our understanding of the product. We actually trace back to why did we design a part to fail. We started doing that with software, we're now doing that with mechanical components. And then we go right to a product launch after we reach certain exit criteria, and not before. So there's a lot of test, a lot of empirical modeling, and then we have something very important for our business, which is reliability grow test. We're moving more and more to robust design as pioneered by Kodak and Xerox.
Now what are our next steps, where are we going? Very important: Our industry is to have standard modules that cut across platform. We're now working on more descriptive and user-friendly computer models of platforms so that we can do that sharing with a major emphasis on standard modules.
Gary Diaz is Senior Vice President of
Manufacturing and Engineering for Case Corporation, an
agricultural and construction equipment company. He has
responsibility for providing general management and
directing the leadership of global product development and
production. Previously, Gary held
a number of positions with General Dynamics Land Systems.
Gary received
his BS in mechanical engineering and a Master of Engineering
Degree from the University of Florida. Gary is also a member
of ASME's Industry Advisory Board.
The next panelist is Twila Hart-Humphrey of McDonnell Douglas.
