The university, Motorola Inc.'s corporate training branch, offers a course on designing high-quality products and manufacturing them efficiently. Engineers start by playing a game in which they build simulated products using Tinkertoys. A value is assigned to each piece and each connection, so students incur charges every time they link pieces. The company says employees completing the course are better at meeting quality and marketing specifications while lowering manufacturing costs. In the Web version, each piece is tied to manufacturing-information suppliers, quality ratings, prices and so on.
Engineers drag and drop pieces together, and a ticker tracks costs.
But if the Web version is well-received, the company may consider offering the entire training program over its intranet. In addition to cutting costs, intranet deployment plays to Motorola's need for speed and reach. The company is soaking up new employees rapidly-it has added several thousand engineers at U.S. sites in the past two years alone. So we have to find ways of making this information accessible almost as it occurs. Models M astering the communications equipment manufactured by Northern Telecom Ltd. is definitely not a no-brainer.