Down in leafy Austin, Texas, where IBM has its primary manufacturing plant for the RS/6000, there have been big changes in the way the machines are built over their short lives: with the original models, it was taking five weeks to assemble one RS/6000 board, but now the company has taken a few leaves out of Japan Inc’s book and switched over to continuous flow manufacturing, where the aim is to ensure that there are no bottlenecks on the line and each stage of manufacture follows swiftly on from the last, the time is now down to five days and the firm target is to get that down to less than a day by the end of the current quarter.
