The automotive electronics industry segment is worth close to $180 Billion annually, plus another $35 Billion for infotainment, and this is a segment with current and projected double-digit growth. Eighty million cars are sold worldwide and they average around $2,700 of electronics content. What’s more content is developing rapidly. Our desire to bring our connected life into the car is one driver, another is the development of piloted or driverless cars, this with safety, engine and energy management and lighting that included LED and laser, and it’s clear to see this is one of the more exciting and rapidly developing areas of the electronics manufacturing industry.
Two Supply Chains Moving at Different Speeds
For many years the car industry has been the more conservative, focused appropriately on reliability and moving slowly to introduce new products. Now things are changing and these two areas of supply chain colliding - the conservative car industry with its seven-year design cycles must collaborate with the consumer market, with its seven-month product life.
These worlds are different and require different techniques and disciplines. The strategy of some companies like Mercedes and Audi is to partner with consumer electronics giants like Google and Infineon to create new product initiatives. They are also opening design centers in high tech areas like Silicon Valley to be close to potential partners and to work more closely with the fast moving consumer electronics supply chain.
In an interview conducted at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where automotive was the clear star, Robert Bosch GmbH Board Member, Werner Struth talked about the red world of the consumer market and the blue world of car manufacturing. He feels that these two supply chains are different but need to work in harmony and that a company like Robert Bosch GmbH Board has a role to play in bringing them together. He also cautions against underestimating the speed at which the car industry can develop and adapt.
More Alike Than They Look
Clearly much about the two supply chains is different, but once you get below the surface much is actually very similar. The electronics manufacturing industry has learnt a good deal over the years from the car industry, after all it was the Japanese car giants that brought us lean manufacturing and much of what we currently refer to as the digital factory, the smart factory or even Industry 4.0 has come from the automotive industry. Mass customization and configure or build to order (CTO and BTO) is part and parcel of car manufacturing and automation and robotics are trends that run concurrently in both electronics and car assembly.
Perhaps the key differences come in research and development (R&D) and more importantly new product introduction (NPI) where the consumer market (red) is naturally less considered and rigorous than the more conservative (blue) car industry.
The key to the successful merging of these two sectors is their ability to manage both complex supply chains well, regardless of differing speeds or differing variables. Managing technology is one thing, and ideas like firewalls to keep email and video data away from mission critical data like engine management, driver assist makes perfect sense, but in manufacturing the world will have to harmonize, and to do so they will need intense collaborations, genuinely progressive manufacturing excellence driving quality and repeatability, and perhaps most important accurate and available manufacturing data with complete supply chain visibility and traceability.
The Car as a Consumer Electronics Device
Project this all forward a few years to where we are all relaxing in our vehicle listening to music or watching a movie or perhaps answering emails while our car is driving us safely to our next meeting through a smart city, where the traffic lights and other control systems guide us via satellite positioning, where Google updates us on traffic via the web, and where safety systems keep a look out for stray dogs or errant children running into the road. The car is now so much more than a mere mode of transport, it is probably the most powerful computing product in our lives, with multiple connections to our surrounding via the Internet of Things (IoT) and huge amounts of data are being pulled and pushed to cloud storage networks. The value of the electronics is likely beyond the value of the remainder of the car and our expectation of its ability to keep up with content, application and software trends is parallel to that of our expectations of our smartphone. Our car has become our most prized consumer electronics device.
At this point the supply chains for electronics need to be seamless, they may even be singular with car manufacturers and electronics companies merging to form new companies. Google introduced Android Auto this year and have been using driverless cars for sometime. How long before they become a brand or co-brand player in the car industry?
Traceability Moves from Requirement to Byproduct
Doubtless the car is changing fast, as is the supply chain in the electronics industry that surrounds it. What remains the same is the relentless drive for safety, reliability and quality. This can only be achieved with a fanatical approach to manufacturing excellence at the highest level where data and traceability are at the core, enabling a fast, flexible and agile electronics supply chain.
Automotive has always demanded strict traceability. Recalls, safety regulations and laws such as the TREAD Act made it mandatory long before most other sectors took it seriously. What changes as cars take on more consumer electronics is the scale of the job. Production is spread across more suppliers and more countries, and every component needs to be identifiable up and down the value chain. That pushes traceability out of a separate compliance task and into the production control system itself, where it becomes a byproduct of running the line well. We cover how that shift is playing out in more detail in Traceability Comes of Age with Industry 4.0 in Manufacturing.
