Now the Star Wars Factory

By George Russell

Suddenly computer technology explodes across the shop floor

At United Technologies' main Pratt & Whitney jet engine plant in East Hartford, Conn., dozens of huge, computerized lathes turn out some of the 3,000 finely machined parts that go into the company's latest jet engine, PW2037, destined for use in Boeing's economy airliner, the 757. Six hundred miles away, at the plant of a Pratt & Whitney subcontractor in Walled Lake, Mich., other machines perform equally complex functions, instructed by electronic signals sent over an ordinary telephone line from a computer back in East Hartford.

In Hinsdale, Ill., International Harvester Co., desperately trying to reverse hemorrhaging losses from sagging sales and antiquated factory equipment, uses a building full of computers, memory cores, and cathode-ray tubes to design and program the assembly of its new Series-50 farm tractor. Meanwhile, the computerized streamlining of shop-floor operating procedures has so far helped the company dispose of $800 million worth of inventory, giving the firm new hope of prospering in the high-tech 1980s.

In Rahway, N.J., chemists at Merck & Co., the country's biggest prescription drug manufacturer, stare into video display computer terminals at brightly colored, twisting geometric shapes reminiscent of an alien virus in a science-fiction epic. The scientists are testing the action of a new drug on an enzyme through computer simulation. Says Merck Research Fellow Graham Smith: "Instead of taking a month to synthesize a new compound, we can now do it in a few minutes."

A new kind of industrial revolution is brewing in the factories of American industry. It goes by the acronym of CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design/ Computer-Aided Manufacturing), and at its heart lies a wondrous, and immensely profitable, link between the electronic brain and the mechanical hand. It is a link that stretches from the designing room to the shop floor, and its simple aim is to boost sagging American industrial productivity. The key is the insertion of computer intelligence directly into every nook and cranny of industrial manufacturing, from product conceptualization to the myriad tasks of actual production. In so doing, the infant technology is already firing up a billion-dollar market of its own, as well as beginning to alter the very meaning of work for blue-and white-collar employees alike. Says Jeffrey Ehrlich, a CAD/CAM specialist for General Electric: "An avalanche of technology is heading toward us. The problem is trying to get people to understand and digest it."

As important as they are to CAD/CAM'S growth, supersophisticated computers and industrial-design equipment are only part of the new technology. Equally vital are the imaginative, often astonishing, new ways that state-of-the-art electronics is being applied to solving problems on the factory floor.

In its "design" applications, CAD/ CAM equipment enables engineers or draftsmen sitting in front of computer screens to make precise, elaborate and exquisitely detailed drawings of any piece of machinery or industrial part imaginable, without ever using rulers, compasses or any of the other traditional tools of the drafting trade. They can simply "sketch" freehand with an electronic pen right on the screen, and the computer, reaching into its memory, gives the rough shapes the precise tolerances requested, even rendering them in three dimensions, or creating solid forms.

Designers can pull their drawings apart, enlarge details, apply colors, change shapes, test them under mathematically simulated conditions and edit and modify them. When the work is finished, the computer then stores the results in its memory much as a word processor files office memos or reports for later retrieval. When needed, a touch of a button recalls the most elaborate designs, from the surface of a semiconductor chip to the layout of a sprawling petrochemical complex, back to the screen for examination and perhaps revision.

The manufacturing, or "CAM" side of the CAD/CAM loop is only now beginning to take shape, but its potential applications are, if anything, even more mind stretching. Already factories are linking up their design and engineering computers to computer-controlled machine tools and robots on the shop floor, and with a push of the button rendering electronic designs into finished products. The ultimate vision is of a "factory of the future," in which everything from ordering parts to packing and shipping out the finished products runs with the smooth, silent pulse of electronic messages moving through computer circuits.

The companies that have captured the lead in designing and marketing CAD/CAM equipment have names like Applicon, Calma and Computervision, and are among the hottest of the hot new high-tech darlings of Wall Street. Applicon, a leader in the field, with fiscal 1980 sales of $75 million, is being taken over by New York City-based Schlumberger Ltd., the big oilfield services firm, which is anxious to establish a strong foothold in the field.

General Electric last year paid more than $100 million to acquire Calma Co., and has spent $500 million internally on advanced electronics and automation.

The market for CAD/CAM machines is exploding. From no sales to speak of five years ago, industry sales this year will grow to $750 million, and are expected to surpass $8 billion by the end of the 1980s. By that time, CAD/CAM and its many variants may be in use in at least 25% of all plants and factories in the U.S.

In both West Germany and Japan, interest in CAD/CAM applications is already at the boiling point. Japan's powerful Ministry of International Trade and Industry is funding a $59 million CAM development effort, involving 20 of the nation's leading industrial and high-technology firms, to design, build and operate a totally computer-controlled factory producing, among other things, specialized engines and gear boxes, with few if any human employees. The plant is scheduled to go into operation early in 1983.

Astonishing productivity gains are becoming almost routine with CAD/CAM technology. Says Paul Quantz, a CAD/ CAM consultant for Dallas-based Productivity International: "By using CAD/CAM, the normal cycle from conception of a product to shipment to customers tends, within five years, to be cut in half. At the same time, potential plant output itself leaps by about 50%."

The biggest impact is on the corporate bottom line. Studies show that pretax earnings usually improve by at least 10% annually once CAD/CAM systems are installed. The devices can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million, but generally pay for themselves within twelve to 18 months. Not only do they boost the productivity of engineers and designers, but they sharply reduce the amount of assembly parts that a manufacturer must stockpile. Just as a computerized office eliminates the need for closets full of forms, the CAD/CAM-equipped factory lets engineers "warehouse" inventory parts in the computer, and manufacture them on the spot as required. With such an application, Deere & Co., the Illinois-based farm-equipment manufacturer, expects to save $29 million simply by eliminating the warehousing of excess spare parts.

The ultimate victim of CAD/ CAM may be that venerated symbol of American industrial efficiency, the assembly line. In reality, the assembly line is often as not a rabbit warren of wasted effort and energy. CAD/CAM experts point out that at General Motors, for example, fully 65% of the company's shop-floor manufacturing effort can wind up going into the production of automobile spare parts and assemblies in batches of no more than 50 to 100 items at a time. With each such run, large sections of the production line of a plant often have to be shut down and retooled to produce the needed parts.

CAD/CAM technology permits production to be organized instead around manufacturing "cells" in which batches of similar parts are turned out by computer-directed machine tools. At International Harvester's Farmall tractor plant in Rock Island, Ill., a group of 69 machine tools and six workers, with support from a four-man maintenance crew, produces tractor clutch housings. Formerly, the job was done by 47 machinists working in three shifts at 32 separate machine tools.

Despite its obvious possibilities, the CAD/CAM revolution still faces several obstacles. For one thing, the loop between design computers and thinking machines on the shop floor is still far from complete, except in the case of some fairly simple cutting and shaping operations. Comprehensive computerized manufacturing of complex industrial equipment is thus not likely to start becoming economically feasible until late in the decade. Moreover, CAD/CAM equipment itself can break down. After six months of intensive "debugging," International Harvester's clutch housing complex still has not operated without at least some periodic electrical or mechanical interruptions.

The proliferation of CAD/CAM technology, however, should not push untold numbers of workers into the street. CAD/CAM'S spread seems much more likely to spur demand for large new numbers of computer-savvy technicians. Says Seymour Melman, head of Columbia University's industrial engineering department: "We will need people who can understand the whole complex electronic and mechanical machinery of these new manufacturing cells, and who can intervene quickly to repair them." Otherwise, warns Melman, downtime from sophisticated electronics gear that suddenly goes on the blink--as it is wont to do--will paralyze factories. Indeed, the new technology is liable to place unprecedented demands on corporations for retraining at all levels, including management. That by itself could prove a more expensive and time-consuming undertaking than proponents of CAD/CAM would like to admit.

Virtually any new and unfamiliar technology is threatening at first. But the biggest challenge of all in the spread of CAD/CAM is whether American management will embrace it fast enough. Like the computer itself, CAD/CAM technology began as an American monopoly, but it will not stay that way for long. If revitalization of American industry is to succeed over the long term, CAD/CAM is almost certain to be at the heart of the effort. That is the bracing discovery that one U.S. company after another now seems to be making.

-- By George Russell Reported by Frederick Ungeheuer/ New York

With reporting by Frederick Ungeheuer

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