The oak floor glistens through four coats of polyurethane, reflecting red, blue and yellow blinking lights. The machinery, tenderly adjusted and lubricated and looking like mobile sculpture, whirs and swivels competently behind transparent plastic enclosures. The employees are gung ho, and the most enthusiastic of all is their boss, John Rothwell, 41. "This is my life's dream," he says. "I love it." The atmosphere where they work is electric, suffused with a feeling that what is taking place here, in its boldness and sophistication, is happening nowhere else on earth.
And that could just be true. Because behind the doors on the eighth floor of Allen-Bradley's good gray corporate headquarters near downtown Milwaukee is an operation that may signal a renaissance in U.S. manufacturing. Department 260, as it is known, is the company's innovative and expensive ($15 million) attempt to make its popular lines of sturdy industrial-control devices better and cheaper than those of competing companies in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan.
In stark contrast to Allen-Bradley assembly operations elsewhere in the same building, where some 1,650 workers still put products together largely by hand, Department 260 is run by 14 people. Six of those are white-coated attendants who man the floor's 26 machine stations, clearing equipment jams and feeding the machines' voracious appetites for raw materials. Department 260 is what engineers call a CIM plant, for computer-integrated manufacturing. Computers, from programmable controllers on the floor to a large IBM 3090 Sierra mainframe across the hall, tell the machines how to fashion 600 different varieties of relays and contactors, essentially boxy switches that turn electric motors on and off. Only 14 months old, Department 260's assembly line is not yet running at full speed. But when it does, working at a rate of 600 devices an hour, it will be able to make 4,800 in a single eight-hour shift. If required, it could turn out this volume for orders received the same day.
And yet unlike the overwhelming machines of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, Department 260's equipment is mostly nonthreatening, with sometimes vexing personalities. "Mamma mia, ti prego comincia a lavorare! (Please, start working!)" implores Mechanic Bruno Lockner to one balky contraption. "This machine understands Italian," he jokes. Some machines have names. Clarabelle is a complex wonder that churns out 1,000 crossbar assemblies an hour. It was designed by Allen-Bradley engineers, and is tended by 18-year veteran Employee Cheryl Braddock. Says Braddock: "I talk to her every morning. I pat her on the side. I say, 'It's going to be a good day.' "
For the machines, the day begins just before dawn, when much of Milwaukee's human population is still asleep. All night, orders have been flowing to the IBM from Allen-Bradley distributors in London, Singapore, Hong Kong, Caracas, - Melbourne and 400 locations in the U.S. From the IBM, they travel silently across hidden cables to Department 260's own network of 29 smaller computers.