Nippondenso Co. Ltd.: a Case Study of Strategic Product Design

Nippondenso Co. Ltd. (NDCL) is Japan's foremost manufacturer of automotive components. It faces the challenge of manufacturing massproduction-volume products in unpredictable model mix in order to meet the high variety Just In Time (JIT) production requirements of its customers, notably Toyota. Over the past 25 years it has increased its ability to meet this challenge and indeed has made the conquest of variety a prime corporate goal. Although flexible manufacturing of this type is usually attacked as a problem involving factory floor operations, NDCL has defined and solved it primarily as a problem of product design. For the most part, production flexibility is accomplished by manipulating the assembly process, which in most cases is highly automated. Close coordination of top management objectives, product design, and production technology are required in order to carry out this approach. As a result, it can be said that NDCL has taken Concurrent Engineering well beyond the goal of improving fabrication or assembly. Instead, NDCL has learned how to use design to achieve the essentially strategic goal of meeting the demands of its dominant customer. In pursuit of this approach, NDCL has categorized the problems of assembly automation into distinct classes, identified applicable solutions for each class, and successively attacked and solved increasingly difficult problems. This paper describes this approach, gives examples of its evolution, and indicates how NDCL has managed production technology, notably robots, as part of the overall attack. NDCL's approaches to Concurrent Engineering