Milestone on Company and Key Personnel

Rivian is a new electric vehicle company that aims to capture market share and attention through its quality, unique vehicles. However, the company is currently facing challenges due to increased competition from established companies like Tesla and Volkswagen. Other fossil fuel vehicle manufacturers are also shifting to electric vehicles to remain competitive and for future survival. Therefore, Rivian has to focus more on increasing its competitive advantage, maintaining product quality, and increasing sales. One of the strategies is robotic automation; however, Rivian must understand how to use the systems to fit its , the new culture and company teams to support the process.

How it fits organizations core competencies

Competitive edge

Robotic automation will help the company boost its competitive advantage in various ways. First, the company will improve its quality and assurance standards by eliminating common human errors that compromise product quality (Jovanovi et al., 2018). The automation will also boost the production process, enabling the company to meet all the demands in time, avoiding negative reviews or product delays. Deploying robotics will enable the company to reduce some production costs and expenses. The costs will be diverted into activities such as research and development to help the company produce products needed by consumers. The additional costs can also be divided towards sales and marketing, increasing the company brand image and product demand.

Maintaining low production costs

The company focuses on maintaining low production costs to ensure the costs of their products also remain low. This strategy will help in capturing the market. Robotic automation will save the automobile company a lot of money. Since the company is planning to increase its productivity of electric vehicles, they need to shift more capital towards boosting production instead of exposes such as salaries. Automation will reduce salary and other costs, such as human resources motivation and training (Pramod, 2021). The company will also improve the production capacity since robots do not require breaks and rest. This will prevent the company from incurring losses caused by delays within a section of the production facility.

Improved production capacity

The company aims at increasing its production capacity so that its products can be widely available. Robots can cut production time by about 60% by taking over most human labor processes, reducing production time (Jovanovi et al., 2018). The human labour will only be deployed in areas requiring human input such as test drives, system configuration, and other sections. When working with robots, the need to confirm and recheck the product for quality and whether everything is done perfectly is minimized. The company can easily roll out the cars from the factory without worries about a component missing. This is because robots can perform redundant tasks without forgetting any component.

High product quality

Robots can help the company achieve its product quality and maintain the culture in various ways. First, it reduces any possibility of errors occurring. By replacing human labor, errors arising from actions such as forgetfulness are reduced (Pramod, 2021). Next, the company can quickly change the development process without retraining. This enables the company to improve product quality within the shortest duration and without errors. Automation can help in quality and product inspection without missing any components. They can easily detect any component missing hence preventing the chances of selling out a car with a default.

Corporate culture to support the implementation

Innovation and problem solving

Automation requires a culture of creativity and innovation. It requires the employees, such as the production team, to get creative on minimizing human labor demand and replacing it with robotics. It also requires an innovative culture committed to identifying ways to make the robots more perfect for the duty. Robots can also be a challenge to the production processes, especially when a software error occurs, the role of the employees should be to ensure the occurrence of such errors are limited and contingency plans are in action in case of any error (Ivani et al., 2019). Once the company switches to robotic automation, going back to human labor due to automation challenges is impossible; hence the team should identify any error before occurrence.

The culture is also necessary to improve product quality and standards; hence the team should increase the extent of automation to perform other jobs such as vehicle inspection and test drive. The inspection and test drive processes are done by human labor, and they cannot test all the cars; hence they sample a few for tests. This creates the challenge of other products being faulty due to the sampling. Robotic automation can inspect every car hence reducing such complaints.

Customer focus

Despite the company focusing much on automation as a quality improvement and cost reduction strategy, there is a need to focus more on the customers. The customer focus ensures that the company identifies customer needs then develops a product to address these needs (De Brentani & Kleinschmidt, 2016). The customer-centric culture will enable the company to do more market research to develop vehicle designs needed by the customers. Then the company can reprogram the robots to manufacture the . The customer focus will also boost the company’s competitive advantage since the products will be desirable. The robotic automation will ensure the exact product features are achieved, boosting product quality and demand in the long run.

Performance Improvement

The performance improvement culture aims to ensure that product quality improves with time. Employees committed to product improvement are innovative and creative to develop various ways of improving product quality through automation (De Brentani & Kleinschmidt, 2016). The product improvement culture also focuses on boosting the innovation culture to make unique vehicles to improve the company’s competitive advantage.

Teamwork

Introducing robots in a company and automating most processes requires teamwork to achieve success. The process includes input from various departments to ensure the final automation increases the production benefits while minimizing costs and expenses (Norman, 2017). All the departments should join forces during activities such as brainstorming to improve the automation process. This also includes other departments such as human resources, who will be responsible for employee motivation and training to ensure the production, R&D; product design teams are creative to achieve the company automation needs.

Role, responsibilities, qualification of the team

Research and development

The research and development team consists of various departments committed to developing a new product design and features to . This includes departments such as product development, marketing and IT. The role of the research and development team will be to ensure the company develop new product designs that automate the production process to guarantee product quality and ensure the exact design specifications are met (Norman, 2017). The team will also be responsible for market research to develop strategies to make the vehicles safer and increase their performance capabilities. Their role is to develop innovation and technologies then automate the robotic process to produce the new products.

Production Team

The production team is responsible for running and coordinating the robotic process automation. Their role is to identify redundancies and dangerous processes that can be replaced by human labor. Their role also covers identifying areas with delays or those that can cause delays then reporting them to the design team to develop strategies to reduce the production time at the stages (Anagnoste, 2018). Robots will not entirely replace human labor at the factory floor; hence the role of the production team is to coordinate with the remaining labor to ensure product quality. They also have the role of accessing the robotics processes and confirming their feasibility and whether they help the company achieve the desired benefits.

IT department

The IT team will consist of various employees in charge of automation. I will be in charge of this team, and my role will be developing a blueprint on areas where to put the robots to increase their productivity by limiting the product journey on the factory flow (Krzywdzinski, 2017). We will automate every area using the blueprint, only leaving the sections that cannot be accomplished using robots. The team will also be responsible for identifying the various problems and developing solutions before errors occur. They will do regular product maintenance and upgrades to improve the capabilities of robots and speed various processes.

Contingency plan

Robotic automation is critical for the organization; however, challenges can arise, especially if there is a breakdown in a particular area. In the long run, the company will develop a redundancy plan to ensure the backup option takes over if any error occurs. However, the company should prepare for short term problems. This can be achieved through the parallel implementation of robotic automation and systems. The parallel contingency plan involves running the robotic automation system alongside human labor; the two should work parallel. The parallel system helps the company identify potential errors, correct them and develop future solutions (Niemueller et al., 2018). The parallel system ensures the production does not stop due to system error.

References

Jovanovi, S. Z., uri, J. S., & ibalija, T. V. (2018). Robotic process automation: overview and opportunities.Int. J. Adv. Qual,46(3-4), 34-39.

Pramod, D. (2021). Robotic process automation for industry: adoption status, benefits, challenges and research agenda.Benchmarking: An International Journal.

Ivani, L., Vugec, D. S., & Vuki, V. B. (2019, September). Robotic process automation: a systematic literature review. InInternational Conference on Business Process Management(pp. 280-295). Springer, Cham.

De Brentani, U., & Kleinschmidt, E. J. (2016). Corporate culture and commitment: impact on the performance of international new product development programs.Journal of product innovation management,21(5), 309-333.

Norman, D. (2017). Design, Business Models, and Human-Technology Teamwork: As automation and artificial intelligence technologies develop, we need to think less about human-machine interfaces and more about human-machine teamwork.Research-Technology Management,60(1), 26-30.

Anagnoste, S. (2018). Setting up a robotic process automation center of excellence.Management Dynamics in the Knowledge Economy,6(2), 307-332.

Niemueller, T., Lakemeyer, G., & Ferrein, A. (2018, March). in a competitive factory automation scenario. Inthe2013 AAAI Spring Symposium Series.

Krzywdzinski, M. (2017). Automation, skill requirements and labouruse strategies: highwage and lowwage approaches to hightech manufacturing in the automotive industry.New Technology, Work and Employment,32(3), 247-267.