Commonality Breeds Flexibility
Other companies also replicate factories and standardize manufacturing
processes. General Motors (GM), for example, operates near-identical plants in
Argentina, Poland, China, Thailand, and Brazil for enhanced flexibility. The plants
were built to a common template that uses the same design, processes, and
technology. 6 At GM, the standardized processes include material systems, body
shop, stamping, fabrication, painting, and general assembly. GM even
standardized the human resources strategies as well as the financial and quality
control systems. GM’s interchangeability, however, is more subtle than Intel’s
replication of plant and equipment. “It is not necessary to make a cookie-cutter
for all our operations,” said James Wiemels, vice president, manufacturing, GM
Europe. 7 GM’s new manufacturing process starts with designing common
primary locating points and assembling vehicles in basically the same sequence,
even if a plant’s process is slightly different. Given the difficulties of predicting
demand for a particular vehicle years in advance of building a manufacturing
plant, the resulting flexibility helps GM cope with uncertainty in demand. For
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