May 02, 2021The New York Times published a very interesting article on Apr. 21 about Arrival, an electric delivery van maker that is pioneering a new type of manufacturing. The company is abandoning the old assembly line approach, first used by automotive innovator Henry Ford, in favor of "microfactories" that require a lot less capital (see An E.V. Start-Up Backed by UPS Does Away With the Assembly Line).
The big benefit is that Arrival's approach requires only about $50 million to build a new factory, instead of the $1 billion or more needed for a traditional assembly line plant. It sounds great if it works, but to make it work on a large scale will require the broad adoption of radio frequency identification technology.
With the assembly line approach, a vehicle's chassis moves down a long line from one station to the next, with workers and/or robots affixing a few parts at each step of the way. This requires large facilities, some as large as several football fields. Arrival is using much smaller facilities, and vehicles move on a platform between six stations containing highly flexible robots that can affix many more parts. In fact, an entire van can be assembled in a far smaller area than at a traditional assembly line plant.
The problem becomes scaling this process and managing so many parts in such a small facility. At a large plant, you have room for lots of safety stocks. You can store a lot of parts near the stations on the line, so workers and robots never run low. That's not possible at a much smaller facility. There is no space for a large volume of components near the line, so it's critical to ensure that those parts arrive on time and are delivered to the correct stations quickly.
With a single factory producing a few thousand vehicles a year, that might not be a problem, but once you ramp up and start producing hundreds of thousands of them at dozens of microfactories, it quickly becomes a nightmare. RFID could enable such a system. If parts and subassemblies were tagged, suppliers could provide Arrival with visibility into the status of production, as well as levels of finished inventory and shipments. Knowing when shipments are arriving, receiving early warnings of possible shipment delays, and being able to know where all parts are located within a factory would enable businesses to effectively manage their production processes.
Will microfactories catch on? My guess is that they will throughout the next 25 years or more, because advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, vision technologies and RFID will enable companies to produce goods far more cheaply and without huge amounts of labor (workforces in most industrialized countries are shrinking as populations age). The good news for consumers is that microfactories will be highly flexible, allowing for the customization of products, so you won't have to choose any color as long as it's black.
Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal.
