In a cinema in Rocester, Staffordshire, my name is being displayed in 6ft-high bold white letters. It’s a simultaneously unnerving and nice experience.
This isn’t the usual way journalists are welcomed when they visit factories, but JCB isn’t a normal company. The firm is that rare beast: a globally successful, large, UK family-owned business. The company revels in its close ties to the Bamford family, its personable approach to business and its Britishness. JCB is proud of its heritage. After a short film about the company, visitors tour a slick exhibition, the highlight of which is the recreation of founder Joseph Cyril Bamford’s office, frozen in time from 1975. It’s an eerie experience to look out of his office window on to the shopfloor, just as he would have done.
It’s this type of marketing that has helped to make JCB so successful. For example, the diggers’ ‘dance’ was created because customers were questioning the strength of the hydraulics used in the vehicles. Today, the gift shop at the end of the exhibition stocks everything from branded pyjamas to power tools.
But there is another reason why JCB is one of the UK’s biggest private companies. Down a flight of stairs behind the gift shop, we find the cacophony of manufacturing – joining, welding, pneumatic tools. There are pallets of components ready to be assembled into backhoe loaders; stacks of sheet steel ready to be formed and cut; and forklifts, cranes and winches moving around. Everyone is busy.
The staff take pride in their jobs. Liam Brown, operations director for backhoe loaders, has worked there for 11 years and has been responsible for manufacturing several different vehicles. “You move around to get a blend of what’s going on all over the group,” he says. As he walks around his line, he stops to pick up litter.
JCB internalises as much of its supply chain as possible. The company produces its own range of Ecomax engines for its machines, which was developed in partnership with Ricardo. The engines are just one of up to 5,000 parts in each of the 90 backhoe loaders made every day at Rocester. These parts are either sourced from the 22 JCB plants around the world, 11 of which are in the UK, or from 3,000 external suppliers. Key components are produced in modular sub-assembly units, so manufacturing can be more easily achieved in different regions.
The backhoe loader is built up over two different lines, one for the chassis and one for the engine. There is a separate line for the smaller 1CX vehicle, which is made differently because the volume is lower and it is more complex.
This is not to say the larger version is not complex, says Brown. “There are 4,000 possible permutations in one backhoe loader.”
Each line is divided into stations. Operatives assemble the vehicles using a combination of just-in-time components and sub-assembly kits. “It means a higher inventory on site, but enables the flexibility needed to change the process if there are any issues,” says Brown.
The assembly process starts with the chassis, which are built up on bogies. The harnesses, brackets and hoses are fitted, then the pneumatics. The vehicle is then moved on to the next line, where the engine and axle are fitted. The cab and loader are next, then the wheels.
The last elements of the process are the fluids fill and the inspection. Each joint and seal is tested, potential failure modes are tested for, and emissions are measured. Quality improvement is a constant goal, says Brown, and there is a system for identifying, prioritising and solving problems throughout the line. Engineers use the Kaizen system to achieve process improvements, with issues identified from inspection and from use in the field being fed back to design.
“Good communication is vital to capturing issues,” says Brown. “I’m a strong believer in the importance of getting the engineers on the shop floor, and the design team participate in discussions on improvements. Our main priorities are safety, quality, delivery, cost, people and the environment.”
Next door to the backhoe loader manufacturing area is JCB’s innovation centre, another source of pride for the firm. Engineers from around the company use hot desks and an industrial design studio. The company is engaged in research in areas such as materials, hydraulics and 3D printing. The centre also partners with other companies for technology development, bringing in and analysing the latest innovations.
JCB has more than 1,000 patents registered for its machines. Tim Burnhope, chief innovation and growth officer, says: “Innovation is our lifeblood. We strive to increase our customers’ productivity and add value wherever we can.”
JCB has 350 different products. Each is upgraded every six years. This means there are 55-60 programmes launched every year – a change every four days on production lines across 22 factories. It’s a “relentless” regime of design and innovation that keeps staff very busy, says Burnhope.
The innovation that has probably had the most impact recently is JCB Livelink, an onboard telematics system, says Burnhope. Developed primarily to track equipment if it was stolen, the system has been fitted to 100,000 vehicles in the field, and is standard on all new vehicles.
Livelink has developed beyond its initial function, and in many ways already fulfils the goals promised by the Internet of Things trend. However, JCB’s approach has not been to install machines with a multitude of sensors to produce millions of gigabytes of data. Instead, Burnhope says it is surprising how much value can be extracted from simple metrics, such as fuel consumption and location: “We realised you don’t need to measure everything. A key attribute, such as fuel use and hours of operation, compared with the norm, can tell us about things such as wear and the environment a machine is working in.”
This information is used to help develop new configurations specific to regions or applications, show operator misuse, provide prompts for servicing of specific parts, and even provide driver training to encourage more fuel-efficient operation. Fuel efficiency is a key design driver for JCB. A large excavator could cost £80,000 but may use up to £250,000 of fuel over the following four years. “Even though we’ve sold the machines, we treat them as though they are still ours,” says Burnhope.
Any measures to reduce fuel usage are valuable to customers but, unlike other companies, JCB hasn’t hurried into alternative fuels or battery hybrids. The company’s Ecomax engine was designed to meet the last level of emissions regulations, without the need for a particulate filter, says Burnhope. “The combustion bowl incinerates soot at a level that means we don’t have to filter it out. By not having the aftertreatment and no back pressure on the engine, we’ve already got an 8% fuel saving.”
JCB’s engineers have also reviewed products, to squeeze efficiency out of them before the company moves to hybrids. On some machines, this was as simple as reducing the RPM, in others it was balancing the hydraulics to the engine, while some of it has been changing geometries so the machines dig more efficiently, he adds.
Innovation is not always iterative, and designers can find inspiration in unusual places – not just construction sites, but also animals such as ants. “We don’t start with the technology; we study the work of our customer,” says Burnhope. “One day, people will stop using bricks to build houses and start using something else, so we have to have a machine that does the something else. It’s about understanding the changing world we supply. We look at how someone else could reinvent us or how could we reinvent someone else. It’s a balance. It’s one thing to have ideas, but acting on ideas is what matters, because that’s what changes the world.”
One of the biggest design drivers in recent years has been urbanisation and the need to operate machines in small, busy areas, which led to customer’s requirement for “little big machines”, says Burnhope. This led to the development of JCB’s 3CX machine, which is 35% smaller than a standard backhoe, can travel at up to 45km/h and can use several different attachments.
Another factor that influences innovation is meeting customer requirements as the market changes. Burnhope cites the trend for consolidation in farming. Farmers now have to move equipment over much larger distances because their farms are much larger. This trend has led the company to develop a new type of hybrid gearbox for its telescopic handler and loader, the Agripro, which marries together a powershift for tractive and road and a hydrostatic gearbox for lifting and loading.
“As the machine goes from 0 to 19, it’s in hydrostatic, giving fine control over direction and speed; above 19, it switches to direct drive automatically – there’s no torque converter,” says Burnhope. “Getting it to seamlessly change without a bump was the real challenge. The other was braking, upspeeding the hydrostatic to coincide with the powershift.”
The other main characteristic of the firm’s approach to innovation is pragmatism, he says. It seeks to make equipment more flexible so customers can extract more value from it, while making it better and easier to use. This idea is embodied in another product called the Hydradig. The company describes this as a new type of off-highway vehicle. “It’s more versatile than any other product we’ve developed. It’s a mobile arm with the visibility and ability to position to any area,” says Burnhope. The product is sold out until the end of the year.
JCB has its own way of doing things, but it has also absorbed best-practice methods for its R&D and manufacturing. Marketing and astute business decisions have played a role in JCB’s success, but it is its prowess in manufacturing, and an engineering culture tilted to improvement through innovation, that enable it to not only be proud of its heritage but also look to the future.
Spotlight – Roots in Victorian era
JCB traces its origins back to the 1830s, when the Bamford family produced agricultural machinery.
In 1948, Joseph Bamford split from the family because of a disagreement over welding machinery and started his own engineering company. He developed the world’s first backhoe loader and started selling it five years later.
By 1961, the company had started painting its products in the distinctive yellow, for better visibility on-site.
JCB was early in setting up manufacturing overseas – it had its first plant in India in 1979.