Putting the X in Texas: Touring Motorola's Moto X Factory

Texas is all about independence, so it seems right that the Moto X, a phone that's all about customization, is made there.

"It's common sense that we've allowed people to be free," Texas Governor Rick Perry said during a Tuesday tour of the former Nokia factory in Fort Worth that serves as Googorola's new Moto X maker. "Be free to innovate; free to keep more of their money; free from overregulation, overtaxation; have a skilled workforce available. Freedom breeds innovation. It's as simple as that."

"Freedom" isn't quite the word that came to mind, though. On that same factory floor, workers changed shifts in seemingly endless two-by-two streams to supply the facility's round-the-clock schedule that enables the production of 100,000 phones a week.

"Jobs" was more like it. The more than 2,000 American manufacturing jobs created by the factory's opening, and Apple's Steve Jobs. "[O]ne of our competitors even went so far as to tell the president, those jobs are never coming back," Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside told reporters, referencing Jobs's commitment to overseas iPhone production. "So you see, they were wrong ... We think that we were the ones that thought differently this time. We chose to be optimistic about the future of both technology and manufacturing."

Until its revival four months ago, the factory had sat dormant for years. While Perry doled out state incentive funds to attract job-creating businesses, Motorola didn't receive any of that money to bring the former Nokia plant back to life.

One of the people who led the effort to get the factory back in working order, which included building the lines and putting in IT systems, was Mark Randall, Motorola's senior vice president of supply chain and operations. It helped that Randall was very familiar with the building already. "I was actually working at Nokia when we designed this facility," Randall said in an interview with PCMag.

Like Perry, Randall feels Texas is the right spot to bring back tech manufacturing. "One thing for picking this area, the Dallas/Forth Worth area, it has a strong DNA in cell phone manufacturing, cell phone experience, telecoms," Randall said. "Companies like Motorola were here. Nokia was here. Ericsson was here. So there's a lot of core DNA in the people in this area around wireless technology."

That's the sort of bait Randall is using to lure suppliers closer. "We're trying to get more of the suppliers that are overseas to get localized," he said. "That'll help us actually continue to shorten our order-fulfillment lead time."

Right now it takes about six days from Moto X order placement to product delivery, Randall said, something that he sees shrinking soon to four days. The guts of the Moto X are put into the customized casings at the Fort Worth facility, accounting for 17 percent of the manufacturing process.

"There are over 150 million smartphones currently in use in the U.S. and until now not a single one of them was actually made in the U.S.," Woodside said in opening remarks. "This is the most important technology of our generation and we weren't making it here. So when Google acquired Motorola, one of the questions that we asked was: Why? Why can't we make the product here?"

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt recounted how his participation in a study of American manufacturing had convinced him it was bleak. But "Google is a place where we take bets. This is a bet we're taking on America, on Texas, on this incredible workforce that's assembled here. We think this is a very, very safe bet," he said.

The bet extends beyond the Moto X. Though there are rows after rows of factory lines, they take up only about half of the 480,000 square feet of floor space. "This is the first step for us," Randall said. "We think about things at Google/Motorola over a long period of time. This is kind of laying the foundation for us and then we're excited about our opportunities going forward."

For more from inside the factory, check out the slideshow above. Also see our hands on with the Moto Maker customization website, as well as Why I Love the Motorola Moto X.