Toyota has long been held up as the production benchmark in the automotive industry, but Renault now reckons that its digital approach has overtaken the famous Toyota Production System (TPS) that all car makers have adopted in order to make cars quicker, cheaper and more reliably.
“The industry is based on TPS,” said Thierry Charvet, Renault’s chief industry and qualify officer, during a recent demonstration. “But it’s based on very steady production. Our world is anything but steady today and we need to be much more agile.”
The just-in-time production system that Toyota developed reduces waste and cost but is vulnerable to supply chain shocks.
Meanwhile, the kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement is too slow to react to the speed of change in batteries, electric drivetrains and software development. Competing against the speed of the Chinese requires a faster pace than that envisaged by the TPS, according to Renault.
“We can’t wait for a decade to reach the same level of productivity as we got with ICE cars,” said François Lavernos, chief information officer for the Renault brand. “We need a strong breakthrough in the way we manage production.”
The breakthrough is what Renault calls the industrial metaverse, which visualises real-time data captured from thousands of connected machines across the group’s 25 plants globally and from elsewhere too.
For example, a lorry stuck in a traffic jam near the French border with Spain can send an alert that a shipment of a part heading to the Renault Captur plant in Valladolid will be delayed by 45 minutes, prompting a contingency plan.
The industrial metaverse also takes thousands of pictures of passing Australs, Grand Espaces and Rafale SUVs on the assembly line in Palencia, Spain, which are scrutinised by artificial intelligence. AI spots that a connector on the dashboard of a Rafale hasn’t quite slotted into place and a screen alerts a nearby operator, who pushes the final millimetre.
Alternatively, if a tow truck operator picks up a stranded Renault Symbioz, it sends an alert that one of Valladolid’s recently built cars has broken down. The garage then downloads the data from the stricken car and the figure is added to the metaverse for all Renault Group senior staff to see, thereby making life a bit more uncomfortable for the Valladolid factory manager.
As the guy overseeing Renault production, Charvet can view all this on a computer dashboard if he wants. But issues of the type listed above are mostly handled by his lieutenants at the factory.
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