You're an automotive manufacturer. How can you build adaptability into your process?

It is important to define what is adaptability? Is it the flexibility to run various products? Is it the flexibility to scale up or down? Is it the flexibility to maintain similar cost when the volumes vary? The adaptability in my opinion is basically how to cater for the cyclic nature of automotive with large volume fluctuations. The process should be flexible to have a bigger portion of variable cost and smaller fixed cost.

For the vehicle design, I would suggest some degree of common design and part. If EE architecture of a vehicle can do in terms of HW development as common parts, its benefits are very much. Designers make the improvement to the same design, logistics gets the same parts, quality maintain the parts, production assemblies the same parts.

Now according to lean principles, we know the best way to manage a process with good quality is to run every part number every day with small lot size. This makes process flexible and robust. Meanwhile the change over need to be with zero time loss. Such a mind set need to be there for the entire team or a company wide, so that improvements can be built in with minimum cost and volume can be achieved as needed. The other important portion is the problem solving which will aid in the quick learning. Make mistakes and learn fast is a good strategy as long as it is followed at all levels.

Digital transformation is something that we can't avoid. Those days of managing the information and data manually are gone. However the best part is that there are numerous tools already there used in many fields like aerospace, consumer electronics, semiconductors etc. We need to shamelessly adopt such tools and encourage team to use them. Even having an IT person as part any functional team will enable the digitization as we know each company and practice are unique and they need to addressed uniquely as they will be at different stages to learning curve.

Training the work force is one way to build flexibility. However getting people with diverse background also helps in changing mindsets. If we need zero defect mind set to be built, have few people from pharma industry or medical electronics. Few from aerospace. Have IT people in manufacturing team. Encourage open tools learning like Power BI etc. and encourage teams to learn and apply. Reward such behavior in the organization.