Serving two masters with IT.

• Author: Luternow, Bonnie A.
• Position: Information technology - Information Management

When an engine manufacturer's assembly-information system paralyzed production, the company had to get serious about its technology needs, and with the finance department's help, it turned a disaster into a delight.

In the fall of 1988, the engine-assembly information system at Consolidated Diesel Co. crashed and shut down assembly for nine shifts -- nearly a week. We lost production of more than 2,000 engines, each one at best a missed customer delivery and at worst a lost sale.

This mishap had been brewing for a long time, mostly because increased production demands at CDC had stretched the assembly-information system far beyond its limit. CDC is a manufacturing joint venture between Cummins Engine Co., the world's largest producer of diesel engines, and J .I. Case, a producer of agricultural, earth-moving and construction equipment. The two companies founded CDC in 1980 in Whitakers, N.C., to produce a new family of diesel engines in the 80- to 400-horsepower range for the two partners. This engine family was an entirely new market offering for Cummins and the sole engine source for Case equipment.

By the time the assembly-information system, or AIMS, crashed in 1988, the engines were fully accepted in the market. CDC's volume had doubled and then doubled again. We'd added a second shift and increased line speed to meet demand. AIMS' role was to track engines through the line and collect data for the engine-history data base.

But AIMS had become a major assembly bottleneck. It didn't have enough capacity to meet the escalating volume and product complexity. To make matters worse, Texas Instruments no longer manufactured the hardware and central-processing unit we were using. And we'd modified AIMS software so many times it had become a fragile patchwork.

Not surprisingly, after the disaster, CDC's board of directors instructed us to replace AIMS with a system capable of handling CDC's increased volume. So CDC commissioned a project-design team, sponsored by the finance department, to recommend a replacement for AIMS. This team included employees from materials management, manufacturing, engineering, quality and assembly/test, as well as the systems staff. Our inventory accountant, who'd been a team manager in assembly, represented finance. We purposely recruited the most vocal critics of the existing system. They probably didn't realize it at the time, but the team members were to continue as project advisors and overseers throughout the next three years. Here's what they came up with and how finance supported the project.

TO EACH HIS OWN

What did we want from a new information system? Every high-volume manufacturing facility needs some kind of shop-floor information-and-control system, and this is especially true at CDC, where hundreds of different engine models are built on one assembly line and where an operator can stop the line for a problem. And to meet safety and reliability requirements, we must keep detailed records by serial number on the content, specifications and manufacturing conditions of every engine we produce.

Plus, we had to consider two general categories of customers with two very different sets of priorities. Case, and the Cummins contract customers, Ford an Chrysler, order continuously in large lot sizes. They have only a few standard...