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Cannondale's Homegrown Factory |
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By John Schubert
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| The damdest thing happens
when you stand next to the paint booth at Cannondale's Bedford, Pennsylvania
factory. The newly painted bike frames that emerge on the tram line appear
to be a random selection. Sizes, colors, and configurations are completely
different from one bike to the next. An olive drab tandem will be next to
an yellow/red road bike, which in turn will be next to a blue Raven (their
monocoque construction carbon fiber mountain bike). The next frame after
that might be orange. Or green. And there's no telling what model it is.
But those bikes aren't really random. Cannondale has spent years honing its manufacturing so that the bikes that get shipped correspond exactly to what's in greatest consumer demand. No longer must they do it Henry Ford's way, building a day's run of black 21-inch road bikes and hoping that meets customer needs. Rather, they build what sells, and they redesign what they build in increasingly tighter time schedules. I've had lots of factory tours in my life, and Cannondale's factory is unique. It's divided into fairly small rooms, some of which are astonishingly quiet. You never get that big barn feeling of, say, the Conrail locomotive repair shop in nearby Altoona. Yet this "human scale" building churns out more than 200,000 bikes every year.
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Press visits to Cannondale
are rare. The company is proud of its cutting-edge technology, but it's
also wary of telling too much. My recent visit bypassed some major portions
of the factory. The visit was occasioned by a new computer tracking system
that promises to bring enormous new flexibility to Cannondale's already-fluid
manufacturing system.
The computer tracking system uses web pages accessible to Cannondale employees in the U.S., Europe, and Japan to track the progress of frames being built, diagram important assembly procedures, and manage inventory of tubing and other frame components. But don't bother surfing the 'net for these pages. They're only accessible on computers on Cannondale's in-house network. The Progress Software program, called WebSpeed, creates HTML (hypertext markup language) web pages for industrial use. But in an age when teenagers use cheap home web page programs to put pictures of their doll collections on the web, what's less obvious to a layman like myself is why Cannondale needed to buy WebSpeed, with its five-figure price tag, for this use. "Data integrity," said Cannondale industrial engineer Bill Miller. "Five people can simultaneously feed data into the core program from five different factory terminals, and the program will get it all correct." WebSpeed is run on a $10,000 Pentium-based server in Bedford by today's standards, a fairly ordinary industrial computer. The software is new to Cannondale, and the company isn't yet making every possible use of its capabilities. Still, a took at how it's used says something about both the present and the future of bicycle manufacturing. It begins with deciding which bike frames to build. When that decision has been made, the computer generates a sheet of paper with a bar code and a bill of materials for the frame. Exact specifications for every tube, dropout, braze-on, brake bridge, etc. are on the bill of materials. The sheet of paper is attached to a cart, and the cart is reeled around to the work stations where the tubing is cut and mitered to size. The cart goes right past a row of now largely unused Bridgeport milling machines - the traditional tool for mitering tubes for brazing - to an area of laser cutter, and plasma cutters. |
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