Just after 2:00 A.M. on 26 March 1991, the night crew at the Chaparral Steel minimill in Midlothian, Texas, cast the first production run of “near net-shape” steel beams in the United States. General Manager Lou Colatriano grinned with tired satisfaction and headed home for his first break in forty-four hours. From a sketch on a paper napkin to the first red-hot slab of metal that emerged from a patented mold to streak down the new mill line, the elapsed time was twenty-seven months. That included design, mold development, modeling, pilot runs, and construction, and it represented expertise from five companies on three continents. “One of our core competencies,” explained CEO Gordon Forward, “is the rapid realization of new technology into products. We are a learning organization.”
Every manufacturing company in the United States would like to be able to make that statement. Yet a steel mill seems an unlikely place to look for lessons on the quick commercial realization of inventions. In fact, so does any factory, as innovation is generally associated with research laboratories and development organizations. Moreover, we usually assume that the pressure to get product out the door conflicts with learning. But as speed to market becomes an increasingly important criterion of competitive success, we need to rethink our concept of what a factory is. Factories can be learning laboratories.
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