Lean, other isms and project management in Company A

This far CoA has not adopted lean principles in its operations and there does not seem to be any plans of doing so in the near future.

Concurrent engineering is applied with electrical and mechanical design when completely new motors are designed, but usually the design process is so heavily dependent on the previous

designs that there is no need, or even possibilities, of applying it. If only the stator winding is redesigned, there is no need for concurrent mechanical engineering as pre-proofed mechanical design is used. In this kind of a project the mechanical designers work is limited to just updat-ing the drawupdat-ings and manufacturupdat-ing instructions. On department level concurrent engineerupdat-ing exists in all projects as different parts like motor, gearbox, electrification and mechanics are designed concurrently.

Six-Sigma is utilized by the motor design team regularly and one of the persons responsible for department’s quality is a Black Belt. In the prototype testing phase of product development project Six-Sigma is used for forecasting the durability of the motors from a limited popula-tion of test machines. As an example, a product reliability test was done with a test group of thirty motors and the test goal was set in 1.5 million cycles for each motor. A decision was made to continue the test even though the goal was achieved and during the extra test cycles some unexpected results showed up. These results were later on taken in to consideration in motor design. Six-Sigma is clearly accepted and its results proven in CoA.

The collaboration and data transfer between departments is organized in a traditional fashion by having meetings when they are seen to be useful. CoA does not use any project manage-ment software that would provide a “real time” status of the project or information about the subsidiary projects different departments are doing related to it.

3.3 Company B

Company B (CoB) manufactures generators, electric motors and drives for global markets.

CoB’s offering also includes complete electric powertrains for vehicle use according to the customer’s needs. CoB’s motors and generators can be used with different supplier’s drives as well as CoB’s own drives can be used to drive other manufacturer’s motors.

The company was established in the beginning 2000’s and machines of the first product gen-eration were delivered to customers for a few years before moving to current 2^nd generation design. Next product generation with more radical changes has already been planned to be

im-plemented in the near future. Naturally the changes in the products are more frequent when the technology is new and the company is learning from its products. As the product matures the changes become less frequent. The third product generation is assumed to live quite much longer that its predecessors as the technology is assumed to be well known by then.

Quality management is driven to continuously improve the quality, for example ISO9001 – certification is aimed to be achieved during summer 2013. Related to this goal different kinds of quality assurance routines have been taken in to use and their results are monitored and ar-chived. Some of these routines are arriving inspection that is performed for all material that is arriving from the subcontractors and final testing of the machines. Every electrical machine is tested before it leaves the factory premises. In addition at least one machine of each manufac-turing batch is tested back-to-back. This testing includes all basic measurements for an electri-cal machine; phase resistance measurement, source voltage test, short circuit test, no-load test and current-torque test (also known as IT-test).

The inverters that are part of CoB’s offering are manufactured by a subcontractor located in Germany. The subcontractor manufactures products and components for highly demanding applications including those of automotive industry. Due to their high quality standards, there has not been a need to re-test the inverters as they are already tested by the supplier. The pow-er electronics and the casing of the invpow-ertpow-er are designed by the supplipow-er, but the control elec-tronics are designed by CoB’s own designers.

The expected lifetime of CoB’s products is defined by the customer’s product specification and it varies from five to ten years, or sometimes even fifteen. Running time has a huge im-pact on the expected lifetime and as the operating time varies a lot between different applica-tions so does the expected life time.

The maintenance of CoB products is synchronized to the maintenance of the combustion en-gine so that in some scheduled maintenance of the enen-gine also the bearings of the CoB ma-chine are changed. The windings of the mama-chines are not designed to be renewed during the

product lifetime. If a machine breaks down it is always replaced with a new one because in many special applications rewound machines are not accepted for use.

The company has six designers working on electrical machines. All calculation, modeling and type testing along with the customer- and R&D-projects are handled by the electrical machine R&D-team. The product data management (PDM) system is also maintained by the team. The individual projects are done by four to five persons.