How “Focused Factories” Deal With Disruption
Establishing a clear and consistent focus, and knowing when to
change it, is the essence of manufacturing agility.
Factories don’t just make things. Viewed
properly, they are where the rubber of corporate strategy meets the road of the
marketplace. Ideally, then, a factory should operate in alignment with
competitive business priorities: in short, it should be focused. When a
business tries to group too many different products, markets, and technologies
into the same manufacturing facility, performance and productivity suffer.
This concept was introduced in 1974 by
Wickham Skinner in a much-cited Harvard Business Review article,
“The Focused Factory”, and was widely embraced by a manufacturing community then in the
throes of a productivity crisis. No-one since has convincingly refuted that in
general focused factories outperform unfocused competitors.
A lot has changed in the last 40 years,
however. Due to the combined impact of creative destruction and globalisation,
change is no longer a likely eventuality but the norm. There is now no way to
predict where the next disruptive player in any industry will spring from. As a
result, it seems that focus has somewhat fallen out of favour. Fear of
disruption often leads managers to regard coherence as a constraint hindering
them from moving with the times. Aiming for agility, many companies are,
intentionally or not, drifting back toward the unfocused approach that
occasioned Skinner’s original article.
Perhaps businesses could use a reminder of
why focus is important, as well as an illustration of how focused factories can
evolve to meet changing market demands. I had the opportunity to work with
Skinner on the recently published paper “The Strategy-Focused Factory in
Turbulent Times” (co-authored by Hendrik Brumme of
Reutlingen University and Daniel Simonovich, INSEAD Adjunct Professor of
Strategy and full professor at ESB Business School - Reutlingen University),
which follows Hewlett-Packard’s award-winning plant for computer servers in
Germany over a particularly eventful period, roughly 1990-2005. During these
years, HP’s Herrenberg factory had to navigate existential change not once but
twice as the personal-computing industry matured, without dulling its focused
approach.
From “innovation” to “solutions”
Above all else, early adopters of personal
computing sought the best possible product quality and performance. Therefore,
HP - one of the few computer companies in existence at that time - emphasised
innovation mastery and R&D culture. It was rewarded for these strenuous
innovation efforts with high profit margins, one of the benefits of being among
the first market entrants.
The arrival of new firms, particularly Dell
and Compaq, in the early 1990s signaled the beginning of a “commodity phase”
wherein customers became more price-sensitive. HP was forced to bring its costs
to heel in order to compete in an environment less responsive to
innovation-based differentiation.
As the market moved from adolescence to
maturity in the early 2000s, increasingly complex consumer needs emerged.
Specifically, enterprise clients began to demand customised solutions for the
computerisation of entire businesses. Once again, HP’s strategy had to evolve
as the company developed capabilities for solving customer problems and
configure-to-order business IT solutions.
The evolution of the Herrenberg plant
With each change in corporate strategy, the
Herrenberg plant changed almost unrecognizably, in keeping with the “focused
factory” concept. In the initial “innovation factory” phase, Herrenberg was a
low-to-mid-volume plant with a high degree of vertical integration, located
closely to R&D and skilled labour. HP’s German plant excelled at the hard-to-manufacture
innovations it received from an R&D programme that absorbed 10-15 percent
of revenues.
In the mass-production or “operational
excellence factory” phase, vertical integration was reduced through inbound
outsourcing as the facility was completely rebuilt as a large-scale factory.
Fewer technology engineers were required; Herrenberg instead took on a largely
temporary and flexible workforce to suit fluctuating consumer demand.
Crucially, HP accomplished this transition without compromising the product
quality achieved during the previous, R&D-driven phase.
Moving into the “solutions factory” phase
resulted from outsourcing low-end production parts and using the freed-up
managerial capacity to establish a problem-solving competency. By integrating
activities hitherto carried out by its customer-support and channel partners,
Herrenberg was able to offer turnkey computer systems ready the day after
delivery to the client’s site. Once again, engineers were asked to undergo a
paradigm shift into a more customer-facing role. Even with training support,
not all employees could adapt. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t take to the new
mission were assigned narrower functions centred around standard modules rather
than solutions integration.
Universal aspects
We do not argue that every industry will
mature in this precise way, or within the timeframe here noted with HP. The
three specific stages outlined above won’t apply across the board. However, one
aspect of HP’s evolution that we feel has broad resonance is what we call
the commodity intersection point, i.e. the juncture at which there
are enough players in a nascent industry to make standardisation and crimped
profit margins a fait accompli. When any sector arrives at this tipping point,
it is usually a good time to revisit factory focus and restore the easily
blurred link to competitive business strategy.
What Herrenberg did right
In its twice-over reinvention of the
Herrenberg plant, HP did many things right. Most importantly, the company
recognised that the main challenge in successfully achieving focus change
transitions does not lie in a plant’s physical transformation, but in the
management of engineers and operators with regard to changing skills and
capacity requirements. The effort to communicate the new strategic focus and
motivate the workforce began months before any actual changes were introduced,
so as to create a sense of urgency and inspire collective commitment.
Additionally, Herrenberg used its rewards system to incentivise adherence to
the focus change, while making sure that top-performing engineers were given
first crack at training for complex new roles.
Hewlett-Packard also ensured that
non-manufacturing functions played their part. For example, HR was given the
necessary time and resources to adjust to changing staffing needs. Sales was
fully supported in its transition to a high-volume, well-integrated outfit for
the “operational excellence factory” phase, as well as to working alongside
engineers for the “solutions factory” phase.
Maintaining focus
HP’s remarkably consistent success during
this turbulent period was partly due to its yearly manufacturing policy
reviews, where manufacturing managers worked with corporate strategists to
answer two questions: “What is our manufacturing strategy today?” and “Which
parts of it need adjustment?” The reviews ensured that corporate strategy and
manufacturing strategy remained joined at the hip, and prevented needless
complexity from creeping in to warp the overall mission.
The in and outs of outsourcing
When volume and cost-efficiency concerns came
to the forefront in the “operational excellence” phase, HP opted not to
offshore Herrenberg’s production to China or another low-cost labour market. If
it had done so, the transition to the “solutions factory” likely would not have
been possible, because the plant would be too far away to service German
customers effectively. Many companies in a similar situation have discovered to
their chagrin that manufacturing capability is not a boomerang.
This example shows that no matter your
current position, you should always have a Plan B. But it is not easy to
formulate and execute a plan for dealing with disruptive change if what’s
happening on the shop floor is, well, all over the shop. Now as ever, factories
must have a clear and consistent focus.
Luk Van Wassenhove is Professor of Technology and Operations Management and The Henry
Ford Chaired Professor of Manufacturing at INSEAD.
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