WHIN in their voices... Manufacturing Alliance Member

Subaru of Indiana Automotive, Robert Wu, Vice President for Information Systems

WHIN: Thanks for making time for us today, Bob. Can you tell us what your role is at SIA?

Mr. Wu: My role is basically as CIO. I take care of all the information systems, including the network and equipment infrastructure for both the administrative as well as the manufacturing side of the plant.

WHIN: And the plant is already very high-tech. What made you interested in WHIN?

Mr. Wu: SIA has many relationships with Purdue and in the community. We were made aware of WHIN through those contacts. And, as a manufacturer, we’re definitely interested in supporting those types of activities. Technology is near and dear to what we do here at SIA.

We also liked that WHIN fit within our corporate ethics and corporate social responsibility initiatives. We always want to give back to the community. So it was definitely the right thing for SIA to participate.

WHIN: SIA has a big regional footprint itself, right?

Mr. Wu: WHIN’s ten-county region overlays very nicely with where our employee base comes from. Our activities at the Tippecanoe plant should be also beneficial to the areas where our associates live. They can see the benefit of SIA participating in WHIN, and take pride in being able to help influence something going on closer to their homes.

WHIN: And some links in your supply chain are located in the region.

Mr. Wu: They are. Several of what we call sequence suppliers are nearby to bring parts in on a just-in-time basis,

synchronized to our line. If they can benefit from WHIN helping smaller manufacturers to deploy technology, that’s a benefit for us indirectly.

WHIN: How important is technology to SIA’s success?

Mr. Wu: We always have a fundamental challenge around quality and productivity improvement. How can you ensure defect detection and gain efficiencies by doing things differently or by employing new technologies? We also want to make jobs easier and safer for our associates. We do what every business wants to do to improve their position. We strive for a quality level and cost structure that makes us the plant of choice to produce certain vehicles in the future.

WHIN: You have a lot of options for exploring new technology, including Purdue. What does WHIN offer that is different?

Mr. Wu: Purdue can be too big when it comes to finding somebody to look at very specific issues and/or capabilities that we might want to explore as a manufacturer in the region. Purdue also brings an academic perspective. WHIN takes the theory around connected factory technology, Internet of Things (IoT), sensoring, data collection, and so forth, and makes it into something most manufacturers can grasp very quickly.

So to me, the biggest benefit of WHIN is that it does the initial product research so that all a plant has to do is plug it in and they can start doing some of this thing called smart factory IoT. And then WHIN can come back in and help them look at it some more and figure out how to expand it and apply it to their specific needs.

WHIN: We have found that production technology tends to be fairly customized and it is in maintenance where we are finding widely applicable solutions. Is there a future in accelerating IoT for production?

Mr. Wu: We all think our processes are different and we all think our paths to improvement are different. So maintenance, which has more apparent common functions, is the easy place to go from a conceptual standpoint. But I believe that every manufacturing process comes down to basic monitoring and data collection processes that are conceptually not that different across various industries. Hopefully technology will advance to the point that it can predict problems in any process.

WHIN: SIA actually started with the very basic Fluke package that WHIN vetted for monitoring vibrations and alerting you to possible impending motor failures. What was your takeaway from working with Fluke?

Mr. Wu: We were doing that kind of monitoring to a certain extent already. It needed to be expanded, but the sheer time and labor involved in ideating and trying new solutions that may or may not work meant that expansion was easy to postpone. Using off-the-shelf IoT that might not be the final solution for a complex plant like ours was still a much quicker way to help us define the problems and test hypotheses: to show us where we could and couldn’t easily implement that kind of monitoring in the plant and to uncover the barriers. Using the Fluke package from WHIN saved us time and money.

WHIN: Any final comments on the importance of WHIN to manufacturing in the region?

Mr. Wu: Speed equals competitiveness. We can’t wait a decade to digitalize and, after a few years, technology becomes obsolete. We have to move much faster than in the past and we have to keep moving. The question is, how fast would we have gone as an area, as a region, if we didn’t have WHIN to not only push the message, but also to lay out how you do it? The fastest way to get something done is for somebody to show somebody else how to do it, rather than waiting for them to go through the entire digitalization process themselves from ideation to installation. Do I think many companies in the area would prosper without a WHIN organization being here? Yeah, I think the answer is yes, but it may not have been at the speed that we would like. I don’t think there’s a session that I attend, whether it’s with public or private organizations or industrial councils these days in this area, that somewhere along the line the name WHIN doesn’t come up. It comes up everywhere now.

Learn more about WHIN at whin.org.