Volvo lesson

Press, 28 November 1979, Page 16

Volvo lesson

Volvo’s famous experiment on “group production” at Kalmar in Sweden — with all its clever robot carrying machines — did not work, according to an article in the “Economist,” London. By getting away from boring assembly-line production with short job cycles and letting groups of workers build whole chunks of cars instead. Volvo hoped to make work more interesting and so cut absenteeism and labour turnover. The job was more interesting, but high Swedish pay and social security still kept workers in bed on Monday.

Even so. the experiment was not entirely wasted. Volvo found that employees who work closely with robots (like maintenance men) tend to become the most loyal of all, rarely missing a day’s work. The company, which is reckoned to be one of the world’s most sophisticated users of robots (along with Peugeot in France),

says it would now apply many of the Kalmar methods in plants without group production, despite the disappointments of Kalmar itself.

Volvo has learnt a panv ful lesson or two from comparing various manufacturers' robots. The model that scored the highest marks was t machine of Cincinnati Milacron. It proved to have excellent handling coupled to good computer control. Its American maker had endowed it with lots of powerful computer programmes (foy changing its tasks, checking faults, etc). An Aset robot built in Sweden alsb won high praise, especially for its accurate manipulation And a robot made under licence by Kawasaki in Japan tended to perform even better than its American progenitor built by Unimat ion. British firms, coming to terms with robots belatedly. have one advantage: they can draw on these lessons.