Nippondenso Co. Ltd: A case study of strategic product design

Abstract

Nippondenso Co. Ltd (NDCL) is Japan's foremost manufacturer of automotive components. Over the past twenty-five years it has developed a variety of approaches to automating the assembly of products in order to meet the high-variety, just-in-time production requirements of its customers, notably Toyota. The approach evolved by NDCL is to design the product intelligently and to make massive use of the simplest automation technology possible consistent with the technical challenges of the product and its production strategy. The result is the capability to manufacture products with considerable model mix at high volume, with little or no changeover time between models. This is essentially a technological response to a business environment challenge.

In pursuit of this strategy, 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 strategy, 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 (CE) and new product risk management are also described. The paper is based both on seven personal visits to NDCL during the period 1974 to 1991, which included extensive interviews with NDCL engineers and managers and plant tours, and on papers published by NDCL and interviews with their authors.