Increasing Productivity at Saturn

T o remain competitive, manufacturing enterprises must increase throughput and simultaneously reduce costs. This requires daily and long-term examination and analysis of a plant’s functions and operations. Using this data, an enterprise can identify production flow bottlenecks and analyze capacity and other factors, which in turn helps identify improvement opportunities. While such information is critical, it is often a challenge to obtain in a complex manufacturing environment. The automotive industry provides some prime examples of complex manufacturing environments. At Saturn Corp., we turned to academic research— work involving model-integrated computing (MIC)1— as a framework to organize the diverse types of data our information system must deal with. In MIC, you build domain-specific models to capture information relevant to a system under design. Tools developed to work with MIC then automatically and quickly generate applications. Because MIC depends on domain-specific models, we must first explain some basics about the process Saturn uses to build cars.