People make Projectors

projectiondesign (all lower case, all one word) is a small company flying in the face of conventional wisdom and making a healthy profit doing it. When nearly every engineering company in the west is moving manufacturing to the Far East, these Norwegians are making everything at home – electronics, lenses, mechanical components, everything. Are they mad? Obviously not, as it works, so how do they do it?

There’s no easy answer, of course or everyone would be doing it, but a few things about their organisation really stand out. Their products are good – well engineered, with a rich feature set and frankly, they project great looking images. To design these products cost effectively requires a particular set of talents and here projectiondesign have an ace in the hole. A sister company is Bard Eker Industrial Design, well known for designing Koenigsegg supercars and Hydrolift sports boats. Undoubtedly this means they get a discount on the mechanical design of their projectors, but more importantly Eker brings a knowledge of heat management and fluid dynamics from their car and boat projects. Most of the noise of a projector comes from turbulent cooling air passing over components and vanes – if you know how to drive a boat hull through the water at 65 knots, or a car through the air at 395kph, cooling a projector is probably pretty simple, as is putting them in a pretty magnesium case. But Europeans excel at design – it’s the decision to manufacture here which is more interesting.

One thing drove their decision to build an in-house production facility – a need for flexibility; it’s possible to specify over 600 variants of their product range. Units are built to order and there’s no warehousing, so a production line that is flexible enough to handle those different variants is vital. The line is state of the art, for instance automated optical inspection of printed circuit boards is carried out at several stages during assembly, rather than once the boards are completed – so if a board is duff, it gets spotted before you solder too many expensive components onto it. Neat. A big Oracle database hooks everything together – orders, stock (which they don’t really have – Just In Time works as well as it can here), accounting and so on. But even this isn’t the secret to projectiondesign’s success. Their secret is simple. People.

First of all you have to employ the right people. Education standards in Norway are very high - higher than in the UK (ouch!) – and projectiondesign are careful whom they employ. For instance, production line workers are recruited from the local town. They are trained for two months. If, at the end of the two months, the other workers on the line don’t think they cut the mustard, then they are fired. Their co-workers fire them, not a manager or the Operations Director. In fact, there isn’t a manager responsible for the people on the production line – they, largely, self manage. They know how many projectors to build each day and they are all responsible – no, that’s too objective - they all feel responsible for getting them done. If they finish early they all go to the pub – if things don’t go well they all stay late. No-one gets shouted at by a big boss, their co-workers, their friends motive them. And they have fun doing it.

projectiondesign are proud to say that are privately owned and will stay that way. They won’t have their company run by bean counters. They are careful about money, but they won’t ‘cut costs’. They believe in spending money where they should and they know that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. They understand the value of an expenditure – for instance, if a shipment of raw materials is stuck in Norwegian Customs, the Operations Director will send a helicopter to get them. Having a helicopter idling in the Customs’ car park motivates them to clear the goods far more quickly than a taxi does.

Of course, knitting together all the factors that make a healthy company is far more complex than all this. There is, though, a lesson here for us Brits, as we move, or are moved to a service economy. It is possible to manufacture here in the West, but whatever we choose to do – manufacture or provide services - we must be smart, and smartness starts in the classroom and leads to the boardroom.