Design For Simplicity
Smart manufacturing is about being smart, not about penny-pinching by using technology. Here is why Cybertruck is a great example of smart manufacturing and a great case of simplicity as a manufacturing strategy.
Product design and the production footprint lock ~90% of manufacturing productivity potential. If you are not touching these two, you are depriving yourself of a 10x bigger productivity space.
My readers are intelligent, so I get straight to the point with live examples and conclude with why Cybertruck is an excellent instance of smart manufacturing.
Harnesses and brackets are always problematic because they are taken as design dependents and absorb big waves of change propagation. Most big corporations sweep the dirt under the carpet and outsource these “hard jobs.” But the cost of complexity still finds its way to the customer.
Painting lines are always soft-belly, capital-intensive, and environmentally sensitive. They require process engineering to ensure quality and impose scheduling constraints on everything else.
Presses take up a lot of space and require expensive dies, a complex domain dependency. They also impose scheduling constraints on everything else and require setups.
Looking at the cybertruck’s exterior design, I see “design for simplicity.” Its body is made of stainless steel so that it gets rid of the cost and complexities driven by painting. Its planar design gets rid of presses and dies. This planar design can be manufactured with laser cutting and folding machines; both are significantly less expensive and take less room. Also, they are programmable processes that do not require physical tooling, dies, and related dependencies. Even the planar design itself is frugal regarding the number of foldings.
I was curious about the Cybertruck’s interior design. Unsurprisingly, it was very lean and frugal in every aspect. Remember the big LED console that Tesla brought to the industry, which got rid of a lot of mechanical parts like knobs and buttons on the console.
Tesla’s electrical and structural design focus on simplicity as well. The giga-casting process that forms a portion of the chassis in one shot collapses the complexity of hundreds of parts, joints, fasteners, glues, and assembly robots. Similarly, Cybertruck’s 48v electric system reduces the amount of wiring. Steer-by-wire not only gets rid of steering shafts and the related mechanical parts that transfer steering motion but also decouples steering from the rest of the structure. This means, for example, the UK version of cybertruck is less different than its US version. The x-by-wire approach simplifies the structure and unlocks functional decoupling, which is more granular and logical than structural modularization.
In short, a good example of smart manufacturing is to design a simple product that requires less stuff and fewer operation steps, relies on programmable processes rather than tooled ones, and decouples form in functional terms. Without this type of smartness, there is no way to attain competitive advantage by penny-pinching on individual parts and improving processes with technologies equally available to competitors.
