Read Online Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky - Free Book Online
Authors: Adam Lashinsky
Ads: Link
theirideas of what ought to be in the design. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
Once the design is under way, the rest of the company kicks into gear. The two organizations that will be responsible for the product are the supply-chain team and the engineering corps. Thus begins the Apple New Product Process, or ANPP. The ANPP is the step-by-step playbook spelling out everything that needs to get done to make the product. The ANPP wasn’t always unique to Apple. Xerox, HP, and others used a similar playbook in the late 1970s and early 1980s At early . A former Apple engineer described Apple’s process, which began as a manufacturing aid for the Macintosh, as part art, part science. The goal of the ANPP “is to automate the science part so you can focus on the art,” said this engineer. The process elaborately maps out the stages a product’s creation will follow, who touches it, how responsibilities will be assigned across functions, and when assignments will be completed.
When a product is ready to leave the lab, two key people will take control: an engineering program manager, or EPM, and a global supply manager, or GSM. The former dictates what the product should be, and coordinates the work of teams of engineers. So powerful and feared are the program managers that some refer to them as the “EPM mafia.” The global supply manager, working on the operations group that Tim Cook built, figures out how to get the materials to make it. They do everything from sourcing to procurement to overseeing production. The two sides collaborate, sometimes with tension. “The way you end any discussion at Apple is: ‘It’s the right thing for the product.’ If you bring the data that proves that, you win,” said an engineer from the mid-2000s.
EPMs and GSMs at Apple are based in Cupertino, but they spend much of their time in China, where Apple contracts with Chinese manufacturers to build its computers and mobile devices. Other companies will attempt to perfect design and then outsource the manufacturing. This is the most cost-effective way. Apple takes an approach that often is the least cost-effective. It, too, designs products to be built and then tested at outsourced manufacturing sites. But once Apple is done designing, building, and testing a product it starts designing, building, and testing all over again. This “overt rhythm,” in the words of a former Apple engineer, culminates every four to six weeks with a gathering of key employees at a factory in China. An engineering program manager, whose job it is to pull together the various hardware and software engineers who contribute to a product, will typically bring the latest beta version back to Cupertino for senior executives to see—and then get right back on a plane for China to repeat the process.
Integration is the key. Steve Jobs summarized Apple’s approach in an interview published in
Fortune
in 2008. “You can’t do what you can do at Apple anywhere else,” he said. “The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer-electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof. There’s no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to dothat.” Jobs was speaking at a conceptual level. A former Apple engineer broke it down to the nitty-gritty: “Apple is all about integration. The way to get true integration is to control everything from the operating system down to what kind of saw you are going to use on the glass.”
Think about that for a moment, because it’s not an exaggeration. Apple doesn’t own the saw, and it doesn’t own the company that owns the saw. It
Once the design is under way, the rest of the company kicks into gear. The two organizations that will be responsible for the product are the supply-chain team and the engineering corps. Thus begins the Apple New Product Process, or ANPP. The ANPP is the step-by-step playbook spelling out everything that needs to get done to make the product. The ANPP wasn’t always unique to Apple. Xerox, HP, and others used a similar playbook in the late 1970s and early 1980s At early . A former Apple engineer described Apple’s process, which began as a manufacturing aid for the Macintosh, as part art, part science. The goal of the ANPP “is to automate the science part so you can focus on the art,” said this engineer. The process elaborately maps out the stages a product’s creation will follow, who touches it, how responsibilities will be assigned across functions, and when assignments will be completed.
When a product is ready to leave the lab, two key people will take control: an engineering program manager, or EPM, and a global supply manager, or GSM. The former dictates what the product should be, and coordinates the work of teams of engineers. So powerful and feared are the program managers that some refer to them as the “EPM mafia.” The global supply manager, working on the operations group that Tim Cook built, figures out how to get the materials to make it. They do everything from sourcing to procurement to overseeing production. The two sides collaborate, sometimes with tension. “The way you end any discussion at Apple is: ‘It’s the right thing for the product.’ If you bring the data that proves that, you win,” said an engineer from the mid-2000s.
EPMs and GSMs at Apple are based in Cupertino, but they spend much of their time in China, where Apple contracts with Chinese manufacturers to build its computers and mobile devices. Other companies will attempt to perfect design and then outsource the manufacturing. This is the most cost-effective way. Apple takes an approach that often is the least cost-effective. It, too, designs products to be built and then tested at outsourced manufacturing sites. But once Apple is done designing, building, and testing a product it starts designing, building, and testing all over again. This “overt rhythm,” in the words of a former Apple engineer, culminates every four to six weeks with a gathering of key employees at a factory in China. An engineering program manager, whose job it is to pull together the various hardware and software engineers who contribute to a product, will typically bring the latest beta version back to Cupertino for senior executives to see—and then get right back on a plane for China to repeat the process.
Integration is the key. Steve Jobs summarized Apple’s approach in an interview published in
Fortune
in 2008. “You can’t do what you can do at Apple anywhere else,” he said. “The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer-electronics companies, they don’t understand the software parts of it. And so you really can’t make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple’s the only company that has everything under one roof. There’s no other company that could make a MacBook Air and the reason is that not only do we control the hardware, but we control the operating system. And it is the intimate interaction between the operating system and the hardware that allows us to dothat.” Jobs was speaking at a conceptual level. A former Apple engineer broke it down to the nitty-gritty: “Apple is all about integration. The way to get true integration is to control everything from the operating system down to what kind of saw you are going to use on the glass.”
Think about that for a moment, because it’s not an exaggeration. Apple doesn’t own the saw, and it doesn’t own the company that owns the saw. It
Similar Books
