What R&D would need occur to create a complex system or a factory like Tesla's Gigafactory or Henry Ford's Model T assembly line?

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riss99

New member
I've been wondering this for a while as I read more about innovators, such as Elon Musk and Henry Ford who have made complex factories to create a product or series of products

What type of team members(i.e. experience and technical skills), technology(i.e. Design, accounting, project management), materials, cost, and timeline would you need to create factories like those?

Essentially, If you were to replicate their innovations today how would you do it? I'm not looking to do this. This is more of a thought experiment that I've been trying to answer, but cannot find concrete information to figure it out.

Bonus points for citation and resources, so I can educate myself more on these topics.

I hope that I have asked this question succinctly, and if there is any confusion please ask and I will answer as thoroughly as I can.

Bonus question: I'm looking to learn more. So any book, resource, and educational recommendations would be much appreciated.
 
@cami777 Thank you for the links. I appreciate he break down.

I'm trying to gather all of the information to see how it is done, so this is very helpful.
 
@riss99 There isn't a single answer to this. A factory that builds gas turbines will be very different in design that builds luxury cars, will be very different from a cheap electronics factory, for example.

It sounds like you're interested in a high tech factory. Let's assume you've finished your research and have a working prototype. Next, you have to research the manufacturing process. Your outputs are going to be throughput and defect rate.

Chances are you are just going to focus on one part of the manufacturing process. For example, the gigawatt factory is done in partnership with Panasonic and Tesla, so Tesla just focuses on forming the body of the car and the motor. This is different from other industries like airlines which rarely produce their own turbines. There is there a lot of business theory around what parts of the manufacturing process to contain in-house and which to outsource.

Your own assembly will be broken down in to different sub parts. You will have the metal forming and stamping. You will have the assembly. The painting. Carbon fiber moulding. Fabric. Finishing. Testing and QC.

So you now have a bunch of raw material coming in and have researched how to efficiently manufacture your products. Simultaneously, you are probably starting to build the factory. First step is to get creative in your financing. How your raise capital will depend on a lot if factors. You can sell equity in the company, take out loans, issue other types of debt, but you need to somehow get a lot of cash. This can make or break a business. Then you have you decide where to build the factory. This will require inputs from your operations and finance team.

Before you design your factory, you have to do a lot of market research as well to forecast demand. It's expensive to build a factory. Build too few, and you don't meet demand. Missed sales are an underage cost. Smaller factories are also less efficient than larger factories. You want to plan out your expansion now. How will will you expand production over time? But build too large and your efficiency drops as your costs rise, plus there is opportunity cost with your capital.

Now you can finally start bringing in operation and manufacturing experts. This staff will focus on very specific parts of the manufacturing process and how the parts flow across the factory. You want your manufacturing to reduce the amount of raw material you hold on to, the amount of in process inventory you have, and that your manufacturing matches the forecasted demand while requiring little rework. You want to ensure that as much of the parts can be standardized across products so your process can be responsive to demand changes.

Now you can begin optimizing. How much does the labor cost and does it make sense to automate it? Sometimes it will, sometime it won't. Your engineers start building customized tools and hardware. You bring in analytics teams to look at every part of the manufacturing process.
 
@randalthor1604 Thank you for the detailed response. This is more what I'm looking for. I'm adding the core concepts to my google doc. Also, how small of a team and budget do you think you would need to build a small factory to prove the concept?
 
@riss99 On a very top level, all current science/technology is built on all of humankind's previous knowledge. Point to one single sheet of aluminum, pellet of plastic or industrial robot in a factory and there is a rich history of human innovation leading up to that final product. The question is how much detail do you want? On the practical side, you can pick one single piece of tech and do a wikipedia search and each time you see something in the description that you don't understand, click on that article before you get to the end of the first article, that way you can put the pieces together on things you are most curious about first.
 
@testinggg Thats actually pretty insightful. Doing the wiki treasure hunt sounds like a fun way to gain knowledge as well.

In so far s this post is concerned, I am hoping to get a better idea for key concepts, systems, technology, experience, etc to put it all together so I can research them more myself. I have a list of things I've been dying to learn and this one is at the top.
 
@etainmacintosh Lean six sigma. I actually know how to do that type of math. A friend of mine educated me on it. It's actually a lot of fun. Adding your suggestion to my list! Thank you for writing.
 
@riss99 To be completely honest, what it requires is the ability to hire good operational managers and let them do their job. These things are far too complex for any one person and require specialists with deep experience to get it right. The fact that Musk is fucking up the Model 3 because he failed to realize that there is a difference between building a low-volume luxury product and maintaining the same quality level in mass production is proof of that.

Ford's first car company failed. It was enough to get him financing for the second though, but it took more than a decade before he actually had the pieces in place to create what we think of as the early Ford Motor Company. Musk doesn't know how to build a factory or put together a complex product, but he has a vision around which the people who can get the job done will rally (and a really big pile of money, which also helps a lot...)
 
@rschlap Interesting insights. Do you have any recommended books or resources? I didn't know about Ford's first failing. Would love to learn more than whats found in a wiki entry, if you have it.
 
@riss99 Sorry, been a couple of decades since my history of technology courses. I am sure that hitting a few biographies of some of the principles involved will provide a few hints. Another approach is to look at this from the perspective of the end product and then back-track to figure out the extent of the supply chain necessary to provide it. The Toaster Project is one book I remember where someone described their project to build a toaster from scratch; when you see the sort of issues and continuous fail involved in trying to do it yourself you realize just how much our modern world has diverged from the last 19th century period when it was possible for someone to actually build many of the items they used daily with a limited pool of tools and supplies. One thing that makes software so disruptive is that it is still possible for people to accomplish this task, but the impact of big data (and the application of machine learning and automatic optimization to same) is slowly changing that...
 
@rschlap Thank you for the response and suggestions. I'll look into finding some biographies and learning more about the Toaster project. Any other recommendations?
 
@riss99 I thought a biography of Ford was great and relevant to this topic (easy to listen to on audible): The People's Tycoon. Also, The Toyota Way is a really great manufacturing management book. Hope this helps.
 
@riss99 The key to the field is Industrial Engineering, but it has several subspecialties and side-specialties including Systems Engineering, Process Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Process and Product Management, and especially for automotives, electronics, cosmetics and pharma and increasingly other manufacturing disciplines, Automation Engineers.

Companies like Tesla and Apple realize that while the end product means a lot to the consumer buying it, the process is vastly more valuable. If you can't build it, you can't sell it, period. The cheaper you can build it, the more margin you can take, the healthier your business is. But timeliness to market and back stock are important, so you also have to have an army of people responsible for making sure components are in place at the time they're needed and putting together supply chains and shipping time tables from raw materials up to finished components, assemblies, and finished goods.

At least as much time is spent figuring out how to build something efficiently and effectively as it is trying to design the widget in the first place. And in places like Tesla and Apple that are essentially Wonka factories, they often have to pull out a lot of stops and work with bleeding edge tooling in order to assemble to their specifications - friction stir welding, laser cutting, carbon fiber part forming and autoclaving, soon industrial-scale 3D printing, etc.

You probably won't find a lot of books on the bleeding edge since companies like to keep that technology proprietary, but there's plenty of material from course works of Industrial Engineering colleges to dig into. And the reality is that you can't start on the bleeding edge anyway - you need to know some background in the field before you can innovate. And then you follow what these companies do - start with what you want to build and recursively decompose it into assemblies and subassemblies until you get to pieces you can order from other manufacturers and distributors, and raw stock your company will machine itself. The best companies learn which corners they can cut and what deals they can strike to make the whole process go smoothly and quickly.
 
@dianeuk Thank you for writing. I'm adding the concepts your mentioned to my google doc. I like the simile of them being Wonka factories in particular. Steve Jobs as Willy Wonka would make for a much more disastrous movie for sure. I'll try finding some online MOOCS and courses with detailed descriptions on what they offer. Thank you again.
 
@riss99 It's an interesting thought exercise and worth noting Henry Ford was in a lot of ways his own worst enemy. His relentless dedication to vertical integration caused the Ford motor company to become stagnant and technologically dated. His model T at the end of its lifetime was behind most competition in engine technology and styling. It was so woefully outdated and the manufacturing so rigid they had to shut down all manufacturing for most of a year to retool and completely overhaul. The result was the Model A.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_A_(1927–31)?wprov=sfla1

The damage was done however and ford relinquished a huge market share over the years because he held on to the model T. Ford may have brought the production line to massive scales but it was his competitors that took it to the next level.
 
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