INCS has developed a system of totally in-house developed software and hardware for the entire process of product design, mold design, manufacture, and mass production without outputting any paper-based design data. By fusing IT technology with mold production, which has conventionally required the expertise of skilled engineers, they have realized a skill-less tooling process at the highest speed in the world. Due to their accomplishments in related mobile phone manufacturing, such as reducing the cost for various types of mold prototyping in the R&D stage and streamlining the fine adjustment process, it is even said that “today’s mobile phones cannot be produced without the technology of INCS.” The flow of a tooling process comprising of process management, mold design, and speedy machining based on their own process technology is gathering attention as a business model for production teams of non-skilled workers to achieve mass quality assurance and quick delivery.
INCS, INC. http://www.incs.co.jp/top.html
Since being established in 1990, and aiming to improve productivity by using IT, the company has conducted R&D on technology to output 3-D data drawn on computers as a tangible item without human intervention. A client once asked the president, “In the era of space travel to the moon, why can’t we make a mold faster?” This marked the starting point of developing the INCS culture of “thinking only of what is needed to realize it.”
Imagine 45 hours. It was in 1998 that INCS shortened the existing period of 45 days required by the mold production process to just six days. Three years later, they targeted a new, apparently ridiculous goal of only “45 hours.” “The reality and the goal were so far apart from each other,” says project leader Mr. Furukawa with a laugh. He had been transferred from a position as consultant for manufacturers to assume leadership of a team of 36 members. Of these members, mainly consisting of young workers in their 20’s with less than three years’ work experience in the company, none were familiar with mold production or were even in the company when the six-day goal was achieved. This made their challenge even more daunting.
“Our president always demands us to have outstanding goals, so none of us could possibly say we cannot achieve the goal (laughing). That’s just INCS culture. Simply, we just talk about how we can achieve something and give no consideration to impossibility. We would go until we became completely stuck. All of us worked sleeplessly even on holidays, and that’s how we tried to reach the goal.”
A young engineer who had no knowledge about mold production deduced the targeted goal of 45 hours through calculation on paper, and the “K2” project had gotten off to a rough start. In order to speed up and shorten the entire process, the team integrated the original technology of INCS that had thus far been developed, thoroughly analyzed the skills acquired by mold tooling experts, and then repeated computer simulations. Successful computer simulation
data was sent to the machine used for actual mold tooling, but it didn’t go as smoothly as the simulation.
“A good example is a latest mobile phone equipped with a camera, music player, speakers, etc. These parts must secure separate space within such a small body. The partitioning in the body thus becomes increasingly complex, and error on the order of 5 μm can damage the entire unit. Computer calculation simply provides an ideal design. In actuality, you have to think about temperature, humidity, vibration from adjacent parts, heat expansion, the wear condition of machining tools, and various other factors. This makes data-based manufacturing a whole lot more difficult than design.”
Though the members were young, they represented a brainy group of graduates from prestigious domestic universities and post-graduate schools. Nevertheless, some were even driven to tears of frustration at times. What helped them overcome a number of difficulties was Mr. Furukawa’s trademark phrase, “No problem, no problem. It’s OK, it’s OK.”
“The reality was that it was not OK at all (laughing). The situation was quite serious at times. What I kept in mind as being important was not showing the members that I thought the situation was serious.”
Mr. Furukawa’s strong leadership as well as his determination not to let anyone leave the team was coupled with the never-give-up spirit of the members, and as a result, they achieved the goal of 45 hours in February 2002, within six months from the start of the project.
The scene of an array of high-speed mold tooling machines called “Fish Machines” imparts the atmosphere of a laboratory rather than a factory.
“The story sounds beautiful if we look back on what we have accomplished (laughing). I truly feel that this experience can be our lifetime memory. We’d better have a challenging goal because we tend to slack if the goal is easy to achieve. I think that human ability is more limitless than we may believe. We have grown up to become a type of people who can carry through all the way to the end no matter what, and it has got nothing to do with age.”
The concept they consistently kept in mind when they built the second factory, K2, was their wish to make monodzukuri or manufacturing more stylish.
“It would be a disaster to have a stylish factory with no substantial manufacturing ability, but if we have both, stylishness is an important factor, I think.”
K2 houses a number of high-speed mold tooling machines, called
“Fish Machines” installed in line, and therefore the facility may appear more like a laboratory or research center than a factory.
“Across the ocean, there are computers named after a fruit, so we thought ‘fish’ would be suitable for the name of machines made in Japan (laughing).”
The humorous illustration of a fish drawn on the machine body is the image of tuna fish that conveys the message of “be quick and continue to swim.”
“We often call ourselves techno-nationalists, with the idea being that we continue to demonstrate our resolve to conduct fine manufacturing here in Japan.”
Their determination to develop everything in-house from software to tooling machines is a clear reflection of the INCS attitude toward manufacturing.
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