Word: whitney
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...late 1970s, though, Whitney and President J. Tracy O'Rourke realized that the marketplace was changing, and Allen-Bradley would have to evolve to survive. The company was too dependent on the machine-tool industry and its biggest customer, Detroit's automakers. Both were reeling under the attack of lower-cost foreign competitors. Although Allen-Bradley's domestic sales had not been severely hurt, the day when they would be seemed just around the corner...
What to do? A planning team assembled by Whitney came up with the answer: Allen-Bradley, since its founding a parochial company doing almost all its business in North America, would aggressively expand in Europe, but with a major new twist. Instead of making industrial controls almost exclusively to American standards, the company began designing them to the specifications of the International Electrotechnical Commission, the European arbiter. And instead of buying a foreign company to make the controls, which several competitors had done, it would make them in Milwaukee, in a new facility...
Thus was born the idea for Department 260. Says Whitney: "The light bulb came on." But an unprecedented degree of automation would be required to pull it off. Reason: a representative contactor that sold for $20 in the U.S. sold for just $8 in the highly competitive markets of West Germany and Australia. To make a profit at the lower price, Allen-Bradley had to get costs down. By using automated equipment, the company could produce contactors for 60% less than it could by relying on a manual assembly line. "Labor costs," says Whitney "obviously had to be a nonissue...
More change will certainly come as U.S. manufacturers try to compete with foreign producers. "This is an issue the whole country is going to have to deal with," says Whitney. Yet not even Allen-Bradley plans to automate existing product lines; the cost of redesigning traditional manufacturing processes would be too great. The totally automated, problem-free factory that can turn out complex consumer products like cars and dishwashers remains a science-fiction fantasy. What does exist, for now, is Allen-Bradley's Department 260, a step toward the future, with temperamental machines named Clarabelle that need patting...
...increase jet-fuel efficiency by 35% to 45%. The new engine is expected to look like a futuristic eggbeater, bristling with twin sets of curved rotor blades that are exposed like propellers but face backward. Boeing is currently studying competing engine designs from General Electric, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney...