Linn Products, in Glasgow, Scotland, makes high-end audio equipment, counting the royal household among its customers. What distinguishes the company from virtually all other manufacturers in its business is its high-tech yet old-fashioned way of making things: At Linn, each product is assembled by hand, by a single employee. This approach to manufacturing is akin to Dell’s, but the products are more complex, involving the assembly and testing of hundreds of components. In this edited interview, Linn Executive Chairman Ivor Tiefenbrun talks about why he abandoned the assembly line.
You’ve rejected the modern production line in favor of a process you call “single-stage build.” Why?
The notion that assembly lines are the most efficient way to build things often is just wrong. The line can only progress at the rate of its slowest operation—or as fast as the rework line can cope with the remedial work.
Early on, we did use an assembly line and tried to operate like a mini General Motors. But try as I might, I couldn’t get all the manufacturing processes to synchronize efficiently. So, one day, I asked one of the women on the turntable assembly line to go collect all the parts of the product, assemble it, and bring it to me. She looked at me a little strangely, went and gathered the components, and assembled the turntable in 17 and a half minutes—a process that took 22 and a half minutes on the line.
That was an “aha” moment for me. We reorganized the factory to accommodate a single-stage build model, using computer-controlled vehicles to distribute materials to work positions, and taught everyone in the plant how to build any product we made. That way, we could do real-time manufacturing, let customer orders pull, reconfigure the factory, and shift resources as needed to produce what customers wanted that day.
But why isn’t the division of labor more efficient?
Adam Smith realized that you create wealth and value by using people at the highest level as effectively as possible. In Smith’s time, wealth was created by people specializing to increase throughput. But soon very expensive machines became the scarcest resource on the line. People’s jobs became less skilled as assembly lines maximized the utilization of machines. This was a smart way to use cheap labor back then. But today, automation is cheap and available, and skilled people are once again the scarce resource. The challenge is to do justice to the skills and imagination of your employees. We redesigned our manufacturing process so that, rather than use people at the lowest level to feed the machines, we have robots supplying the people, allowing them to work at the highest possible level.
What’s the result?
When one person builds a product from start to finish, they feel responsible for it and can see the connection between what they do and how the product performs. And since the people who build the products are often responsible for servicing them later, those employees interact with customers and see how happy—or unhappy—they are. So, they’re learning a lot more than just how to assemble a product. They start to spot connections that no engineer, service technician, or assembly-line worker ever would, and bring skills developed in one area to bear on what they do somewhere else. As a result, they can contribute to product quality with improvements and innovation.
What’s an example?
Our senior recording engineer came to the company when he was 16. He worked for us for a year, and we thought he had great potential, so we sponsored him at university, where he studied music and physics. When he returned to Linn, he worked in our factory and over the years came up with lots of ideas that have improved our turntable and loudspeakers. Recently, as a recording engineer, he did an extraordinary chorale recording in Notre Dame. What makes him good at this is partly that he thoroughly understands the entire process, from the moment the music is captured in a cathedral to the moment it’s reproduced in someone’s living room. We have lots of people here with that sort of deep and broad understanding. Can I prove that this rich knowledge of the entire process accounts for all his skill? No. Do I think it helps explain why he’s exceptional at what he does? Absolutely.