The Policy Trajectories of Autonomous Vehicles

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) technology promises to dramatically reduce deaths and economic losses from crashes caused by human error, increase mobility for those with disabilities, and revolutionize the auto industry. Yet legislation to facilitate oversight of the development and deployment of AVs is stalling in Congress. Professor John Paul MacDuffie offers a primer on AV technology policy, and discusses strategies for addressing safety and other public concerns while still facilitating AV innovation in the private sector.https://repository.upenn.edu/pennwhartonppi/1056/thumbnail.jp

Creating Lean Suppliers: Diffusing Lean Production Through the Supply Chain

Hon& of America has developed a comprehensive approach to teaching the principles of lean production to its suppliers. The centerpiece of these efforts is a program called BP (for ?Best process?, ?Best Performance ?, ?Bs Practice?), in which a crossfunctional team of persomel born Honda and the supplier work intensively for week or even months on narrowly-targeted improvement projects in the supplier?s plant. BP has been quite successfid in enhancing supplier performance; suppliers participating in the program in 1994 avmge~ productiviw gains of 50?/0 on lines reengineered by BP. However, Honda found there was high variation in the extent to which suppliers were able to transfer the lessons taught beyond the line or plant where the BP intervention occurred. We explore the reasons for this variatio~ touching on how the BP process interacts with the broader relationship between customer and supplier, organizational learning, technology transfer, and the transplantation of Japanese management practices to the U.S. The case studies we present of three of Honda?s U.S. suppliers illustrate the dynamics of the learning process and the complex relationship that emerged between ?teacher? and ?student?. We found that achieving self sufficiency with the lean production techniques taught by BP is more likely when the supplier has a moderate degree of identification with and dependency on the customer. If these are too hi~ the supplier will be tempted to continue to rely on the customer for assistance; if they are too low, the learning relationship may break down. It appears that Honda has achieved the most supplier self reliance with larger U.S.-owned companies, who have an identity as strong, competent actors, and thus try to reduce dependence on Honda by mastering the new knowledge quickly. Yet these larger suppliers may be less responsive to Honda?s needs that small-to-medium suppliers whose capabilities can be boosted through Honda?s supplier development activities.Funding for this research was provided by the International Motor Vehicle Progam at M.I.T., the Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy, and Organization at Whartou and the Center for Regional Economic Issues at Case Western Reserve University

From Fixed to Flexible: Automation and Work Organization Trends from the International Assembly Plant Survey

The paper is organized into seven sections. First, we define how we measure automation in the assembly plant study. Second, we describe the overall regional trends in the use of automation from 1989 to 1993/94. Third, we explore the patterns of usage for robotic equipment across regions, emphasizing in particular the significant move by many companies towards the replacement of fixed or "hard" automation with flexible, programmable automation. Fourth, we explore departmental differences in the use of automation, emphasizing the evolution in thinking about the most effective way to automate various tasks in the body, paint, and assembly shops. While automation levels continue to rise in the body and paint shops, a different approach is being taken in the assembly department, the most labor-intensive area of the plant and yet the place where total automation solutions have been most elusive. Fifth, we describe how trends in the adoption of flexible automation are linked to the adoption of flexible work practices that seek to boost worker involvement in production-related problem-solving. Sixth, we summarize what we have learned about the performance implications (in terms of productivity and quality) of the automation trends described here. The seventh section presents our conclusions from these analyses and our speculation about future trends in automotive manufacturing automation.The International Motor Vehicle Program and the Sloan Foundation

Performance Findings of the International Assembly Plant Study

We recently undertook the largest in-depth evaluation ever of automobile assembly plants around the world. In the Second Round of the International Assembly Plant Study, we surveyed 88 automobile assembly plants representing 20 companies and as many nations (see figure 1 for a distribution of plants by region of the world). We collected data on a host of different issues ranging from production processes and design choices to labor relations and organization of work. Here we report on our performance findings. In addition to reporting on our most recent findings, reflecting performance in 1993/4, we will compare those with the performance findings of the First Round of the International Assembly Plant Study which took place in 19892. European plants have shown the greatest percentage improvement in productivity of any region, but Korean plants, and plants in North America have also shown considerable gain. Given the minimal improvement in the average performance of Japanese-owned assembly plants in Japan, the performance gap between US and Japanese plants has closed significantly, although a differential still remains. In the area of quality, the European and US producers have shown tremendous improvement, and are approaching Japanese quality levels. However, our quality data only reflects vehicles sold in the United States, and as such, may overstate the average quality level of the European producers. The quality level of new entrant plants (particularly Korea) has not followed the world-wide trend in improvement in quality. One of our most important observations from this round is that there are tremendous performance differentials within each region of the world. This reflects different capabilities of companies operating in those regions. We are currently undertaking extensive analyses to understand the drivers of these intra-regional performance differences.MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program and the Sloan Foundatio

International Trends in Work Organization in the Auto Industry: National-Level vs. Company-Level Perspectives

Draft Version for 1996 IMVP Sponsors Meeting. Some tables not included.Changes in shop-floor work organization are a central part of broader changes in industrial relations in many industries around the world. In the automotive industry, the focus of this paper, international competition, new technological capabilities, and production system innovations have prompted many companies to move away from the dominant mass production model and to adopt new, flexible principles for organizing work that have demonstrable advantages in terms of economic performance. It is clear that these principles are often adopted selectively (and incompletely) and modified as they diffuse. What is less clear is how much variation in adoption occurs (and how extensive the modifications), whether the patterns of diffusion are driven more by national-level or company-level factors, and how closely work organization changes are related to the overall industrial relations system, which does vary considerably at the national level. I will argue in this paper that the emergence of a new set of dominant organizing principles in the auto industry has created the conditions for more convergence across countries and divergence within countries in work organization. These conditions affect the organization of work far more directly than they affect the broader industrial relations system, with the latter more likely to retain many country-specific characteristics despite the pressures for decentralization and responsiveness to local circumstances (Katz, 1993; Locke, 1992). But whereas national differences in industrial relations were likely, in the past, to dominate changes in work organization and create clear national patterns, I will argue that the forces for convergence across and divergence within countries are now more likely to overwhelm national differences.The International Motor Vehicle Program at M.I.T. and the Sloan Foundation

Prototypes and Strategy: Assigning Causal Credit Using Fuzzy Sets

Strategies often are stylized on the basis of particular prototypes (e.g. differentiate or low cost) whose efficacy is uncertain often due to uncertainty of complex interactions among its elements. Because of the difficulty in assigning causal credit to a given element for an outcome, the adoption of better practices that constitute strategies is frequently characterized as lacking in causal validity. We apply Ragin\u27s (2000) fuzzy logic methodology to identify high performance configurations in the 1989 data set of MacDuffie (1995). The results indicate that discrete prototypes of practices are associated with higher performance, but that the variety of outcomes points to experimentation and search. These results reflect the fundamental challenge of complex causality when there is limited diversity in observed experiments given the large number of choice variables. Fuzzy set methodology provides an approach to reduce this complexity by logical rules that permit an exploration of the simplifying assumptions. It is this interaction between prototypical understandings of strategy and exploration in the absence of data that is the most important contribution of this methodology

Introduction: knowledge generation and innovation diffusion in the global automotive industry—change and stability during turbulent times

This introduction to this special section establishes the context within which automotive firms cope with turbulence caused by globalization, new governmental regulations, and advances in electronics, communication, and drive train technologies. While exploring change, the papers in the special section also report on stability, e.g. in the central role of Original Equipment Manufacturers in system integration and their resulting dominance over product architecture and supply chain dynamics. We apply the lens of change and stability to two stages of the innovation lifecycle: (i) knowledge generation; and (ii) the diffusion of innovations. The papers, organized along these dimensions, help us understand how and why automotive firms are changing their ways of innovating, but also why past patterns of innovative behavior persist. We close with an outlook on future research topics to complement this special sectio

What Does Transformation Mean to Workers? The Effects of the "New Industrial Relations" on Union Employees' Attitudes

The Chrysler-UAW Modern Operating Agreement (MOA) is a prototype for the "new industrial relations," establishing (through collective bargaining) reduced job classifications, shopfloor work teams, a pay-for-skills compensation plan, extensive training, and decentralization of various production and quality responsibilities to teams -- all under a joint union-management governance structure. We use a 1993 survey of worker attitudes at six MOA plants (two to five years after MOA was implemented) to predict which workers are likely to express approval of the MOA and the team concept. The survey measured individual, group, and organization-level (i.e. establishment) characteristics in order to capture the full context surrounding the implementation of the MOA, including plant-level variation in worker attitudes. Variables at each of these levels of analysis are statistically significant predictors of favorable attitudes towards MOA and towards the team concept, indicating the value of such a cross-level analysis for understanding worker attitudes towards workplace transformation. We also analyze plant-level differences in attitudinal outcomes and find that some of the variation is explained by factors that are not idiosyncratic to individual plants.Chrysler Corporation, M.I.T. and George Washington University (part of the broader research team studying the MOA with funding from the Department of Labor), the International Motor Vehicle Program at M.I.T. and the Jones Center at Wharton