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Chapter 4
Organizational Framework Bearings PLC is a medium-size company (roughly 2,000 people) that specializes in designing, manufacturing, and selling ball bearings for use in the automobile, railroad, and aircraft industries. Bearings fulfill a technical function and are used in numerous mechanical systems, guiding one part that is rotating in relation to another. We stayed in the company’s aviation department. Before presenting the organization of the aviation department, I should explain two features of the industrial sector in which Bearings PLC operates. In this sector, subcontracted systems were for a long time designed by the client. Subcontractors were simply responsible for manufacturing them. However, little by little, clients have asked their subcontractors to design products on the basis of specifications defining constraints and performance levels.1 This has obliged suppliers to set up their own design departments. Air Bearings (a division of Bearings PLC that serves the aviation industry) based its department on the organization that already existed in Bearings’ automotive division, where design work was already carried out. The precision demanded in this sector and the quality of the materials used, in combination with the small production runs (50–200 bearings per year), mean that sales prices are much higher (10–100 times) than in the automotive sector. Cost is not a major concern in the design of these products. In addition, products of this type are difficult to obtain on account of their high precision. As a result, criteria related to high performance have taken priority over criteria related to ease of manufacturing,2 to which designers do not pay much attention. Within this framework, the organization at Air Bearings has the following characteristics: • The production site, which is small (about 200 people), houses manufacturing, assembly, the production engineering department, and the sales department. The design office itself is located at Bearings’s head office and comprises a design office,3 a research department, and a test laboratory. The two sites are about 10 kilometers apart. Despite being very small, the distance substantially reduces relations between the design office and the rest of the factory. In fact, most contacts occur at meetings (which are part of the formal design process) or when problems arise that have to be solved jointly. Most informal relations take the form of phone calls.