MPRA Munich Personal RePEc Archive Enriching Production: Perspectives on Volvo's Uddevalla plant as an alternative to lean production Sandberg, A˚ke Natinal institute for working life / Arbetslivsinstitutet, Sweden, Deprtment of Sociology, Stockholm University 1995 Online at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/10785/ MPRA Paper No. 10785, posted 26. September 2008 / 21:42 Enriching production Perspectives on Volvo’s Uddevalla plant as an alternative to lean production ÅKE SANDBERG, Editor Swedish Institute for Work Life Research Stockholm, Sweden Digital edition Stockholm 2007 With a new preface by Åke Sandberg, National Institute for Working Life, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. E-mail [email protected] or [email protected] Avebury Aldershot • Brookfield USA • Hong Kong • Singapore • Sydney Digital edition © Å. Sandberg and the authors 2007 Printed edition © Å. Sandberg and the authors 1994 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permis- sion of the publisher. Published by Avebury Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Old Post Road Brookfield Vermont 05036 USA A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the US Library of Congress. Typeset by Axel Henriksson, Datadromeda for Newman Information Design AB Maria Bangata 6 S-118 63 Stockholm Sweden ISBN 1 85972 106 0 Contents Preface vii The book and its authors ix The Uddevalla experience in perspective, Åke Sandberg 1 Part I Volvo’s innovative Uddevalla and Kalmar plants The creation of a new production system at the Volvo automobile assembly plant in Uddevalla, Sweden, Kajsa Ellegård 37 Production system design – a brief summary of some Swedish design efforts, Tomas Engström and Lars Medbo 61 The Uddevalla plant: Why did it succeed with a holistic approach and why did it come to an end? Lennart Nilsson 75 Volvo Kalmar – twice a pioneer, Thomas Sandberg 87 Part II The performance of the Uddevalla plant in a comparative perspective The fate of the branch plants – performance versus power, Christian Berggren 105 Assembly skills, process engineering and engineering design, Henrik Blomgren and Bo Karlson 127 Building for new production concepts, Colin Clipson, Jesper Steen, Anders Törnqvist and Peter Ullmark 137 iii Designed for learning: A tale of two auto plants, Paul S. Adler and Robert E. Cole 157 Limits to innovation in work organization?, Bob Hancké and Saul Rubinstein 179 Group work and the reception of Uddevalla in German car industry, Ulrich Jürgens 199 Part III Volvo car plants internationally and the alliance with Renault Volvo truck and bus in the UK: The clash of the Titans, Paul Thompson and Terry Wallace 217 Volvo-Gent: A Japanese transplant in Belgium or beyond? Rik Huys and Geert Van Hootegem 231 First DAF, then Volvo and now Mitsubishi, Ben Dankbaar 249 Missing the road: Working life at Volvo Nova Scotia, L. Anders Sandberg 269 Volvo in Malaysia, Hing Ai Yun 283 The origins of team work at Renault, Michel Freyssenet 293 Fait accompli? A Machiavellian interpretation of the Renault–Volvo merger, Karel Williams, Colin Haslam and Sukhdev Johal 309 Part IV Beyond lean production Japanese work policy: Opportunity, challenge or threat? Norbert Altmann 329 Lean production in the automobile industry: Second thoughts, Dan Jonsson 367 Humanization of the production system and work at Toyota Motor Co and Toyota Motor Kyushu, Koichi Shimizu 383 Recent developments at Toyota Motor Co, Terje Grönning 403 Social preconditions for lean management and its further development, Paul Lillrank 427 Lean production. The Micro-Macro dimension, employment and the welfare state, Peter Auer 437 iv Preface to the Digital Edition 2007 The innoatie, productie and humane Volo Kalmar and Uddealla plants, with arious concepts of group work, were closed in 1994 and 1993 respectiely. Times were changing. Unemployment was rising; unions were focussing more on job creation and employment than on quality of work. Globalization put pressure on homogenization of production processes. Volo got a new top management, after Pehr G. Gyllenhammar who had conceied the new factories in cooperation with unions. The bestselling book ‘Lean production’ (Womack et al) articulated and reinforced the ideology that there is just one best way and that no iable alternaties exist. Today the Kalmar plant is rented as a warehouse, and for ICT produc- tion. In the Uddealla plant Pininfarina with 800–900 employees produces a Volo conertible using a product flow assembly system. In the other half of the plant Volo Bus is welding space frames. But ideas of competitie and human-centred forms of industrial produc- tion are still alie and they are practiced in arious sectors. The Volo Kalmar and Uddealla production concepts are still used, by academics and practitioners alike, as reference points and as reminders of the possibility of alternaties with quality in both work and products. The print editions of Enriching Production were quickly sold out. In January 2007, as a result of the centre-right government’s decision to close Arbetslivsinstitutet/ Swedish National Institute for Working Life, we are organizing our archies and we found discs with the book. As there is still a demand we decided to prepare a digital edition, with no changes in the text, except this preface. Many thanks to Lena Karlsson for digital editing. Enriching Production was followed by a workshop and a special issue on ‘Good work and productivity’, in Economic and Industrial Democracy, Vol. 19, No 1, 1998. An indication of the topicality is a recent interiew with Pehr G. Gyllen- hammar in LO-tidningen, the journal of the Swedish Trade Union Con- federation (Sept. 15, 2006). Gyllenhammar expresses an understanding for strikes in industry after 1968, and he states that ‘companies must use the full potential of the employees, and the competitie adantage of good education, professional skills and an advanced form or work organization’. The basic idea is the same as when the Kalmar plant was planned 30 years ago, Gyllenhammar says: ‘Why should it be so damned boring to assemble a car, when eerybody loes to repair and tinker about with the same car in their spare time? It should be the other way around, delight and pride in producing the car.’ Stockholm in January 2007 Åke Sandberg Preface The background to this book is the closure of Volvo’s car assembly plant in Uddevalla in western Sweden. The fate of the plant, being a symbol for human-centred production, was debated by policy-makers and researchers around the world. The Swedish Institute for Work Life Research decided that the experiences of the plant should be gathered in a book with an in- ternational and comparative perspective. Cecilia Runnström has assisted me in the editorial work, and her work has been important for the realization of this book project. Fern Scott edited the English of all the chapters; also Aina Godenius and Ann-Britt Hellmark contributed here. Gary Newman and Axel Henriksson prepared the camera-ready copy. At the Institute director Anders L. Johansson and prof. Casten von Otter supported our work on the book during the whole process, and Iris Frank and Gudrun Hagberg helped with administrative tasks. Thank you all. Postscript. January 1995 As this book was on its way to the printers, Volvo announced its intention to develop convertible and coupe versions of its 850 model in cooperation with the British TWR and to produce them in the Uddevalla plant, applying its unique production concept. This is good news; the Uddevalla concept of teams assembling whole cars may be further developed and get a chance to show its potential in car production which, as suggested in this book, is increasingly consumer oriented. On the other hand, for production in longer series at the Swedish Tors- landa plant and at the Belgian Gent plant, Volvo has made the choice of another production concept: preassembly of modules (often with long job cycles) to be finally assembled on a line with a high degree of automation. As researchers argued in the debate, Volvo in fact not only made a reduction in capacity, but a strategic choice of production concept basically different from that of Uddevalla. But with the Uddevalla plant again as a point of reference, possibilities grow of developing human-oriented and productive production concepts, ‘enriching production’, also adapted for production in long series. There is not, as the authors on ‘lean production’ want us to believe, one single best work organization model. In the changing realities of industrial production, Uddevalla’s ‘enriching production’ remains an important con- tribution to future developments. Åke Sandberg vi The book and its authors This book discusses a pathbreaking effort to unite good jobs with produc- tivity in industry – Volvo’s innovative Uddevalla car assembly plant where competent workers in groups built complete cars during a short period of four years. The assembly line was not only broken, it was totally abandoned and the groups all worked in parallel independently of each other. The skilled work- ers were supported by advanced computer technology to guide the vehicles transporting components to the groups. Each car produced was destined to one specified customer. The plant started operation in 1989 and three years later the decision was made to close it down – together with the older Kalmar plant, the pioneer in breaking with line production. The authors of the book, a wide range of distinguished scholars of the field, analyze this experience in an international and comparative perspective. Enriching production The double goal of good jobs and productivity is the essence of what we want to call enriching production.