Fancy Lamps

Set amidst black hillsides of slag, the Ford Assembly Plant, on the South Side of Chicago, is a shapeless, windowless expanse of white concrete buildings and bay doors. The pipes and steel metalwork which cover the building give way to brick at the entrance which is flanked by the models of new cars currently being put together inside. Though Fords have been made on this spot since 1924—the plant originally made Model Ts—the factory has been completely rebuilt thirteen times. A few traces of the original structure remain—a brick wall, part of a roof, and an entranceway.

A large blue sign set on an easel greets visitors. Today it declares 003 DAYS WITHOUT A LOST TIME ACCIDENT, which is rather like someone bragging that he has not taken a drink since lunch.

Visitors are ushered into a bright, clean conference room containing a horseshoe laminate table and no fewer than eighteen managers, representing the various aspects of the huge 2.8 million square foot plant. There is a Quality Control Manager and a Material Planning and Logistics Manager, a Human Resources Manager, an Off-Shift Manager and even one whose title is Lean Operations Manager. They are enthusiastic, their language peppered with code phrases and production mantras. The engineers, in particular, speak in a language that the layman can barely grasp.

'Right now we're going through surface transfer for '08,' says head engineer Ken Couey. 'We're always driving toward the CAD nominal—this fixture is an exactly moulded fixture of the CAD nominal data.' CAD stands for 'computer-aided drawing'. Couey is talking about the idealized computer image of a perfect car that is the blueprint the actual automobiles are constructed from. An automobile consists of roughly 10,000 individual parts—tyres, bolts, axles, panels, cams, knobs, pistons, seals, hinges, shafts, wires, gauges. By the time they arrive at Ford Assembly, some have already been put together leaving only 2,400 components: an instrument panel, for instance, which is the entire dashboard of a car, arrives in one piece, gauges and buttons and all, ready to be installed.

The Ford plant is like an aeroplane hangar—high ceilings criss-crossed with white steel trusses. It is never particularly loud, and occasionally a bank of exquisite, new-car smell wafts delightfully by. The entire factory radiates control and order—clean, well lit, floors freshly painted. Everything is methodical, even to the smallest detail: the fire extinguishers at the clearly marked fire stations are not only sealed in protective plastic bags, but those bags are emblazoned, FORD FIRE EXTINGUISHER.

The easiest way to understand the intricate process that gathers these thousands of parts and binds them up into a car (at the rate of a new finished automobile every 64.8 minutes) is to break the process down into two central tasks.

The first task is the actual assemblage. Henry Ford is famous for creating the assembly line, an innovation he pioneered in the years before the First World War, but the line today has nothing so rude as a conveyor belt. Rather, it is a complicated, snaking track of individual, computer-monitored racks that hold the growing cars and move them through the factory. Like Cooper, Ford Assembly can seem oddly empty at times, with no workers in sight, only lines of unpainted cars, their sides shiny naked metal, inching slowly along. At times the line even doubles back and arches above itself. The cars then hang on harnesses instead of rolling, as if on parade across the ceiling.

The workers, when you can see them, are small figures standing in the heart of the machinery. There are 2,000 workers at Ford Assembly. They are divided into task teams of between five to ten people, depending on what they are doing. They dress casually and chat among themselves, handling electric wrenches that hang on tubes from the ceiling, or lifting door sections using robot-assisted suction devices. They are members of the United Auto Workers Local 551, but they work harmoniously alongside non-union labour—four hundred Kawasaki industrial robots, used primarily for welding. Each six-foot-high robot moves back and forth on a rubberized track resembling half a tank tread.

There is an almost poetic grace to the various swoops and gestures of the robots. A half finished section of car slides in, and a frame moves in and locks it in place. Then four robots, one at each corner, roll forwards and start to weld, throwing out sprays of sparks—molten metal—each time the pinchers close with 1,200 pounds of pressure, to make the weld. Ford, which likes to keep track of such things, says there are 2,700 welds in an average car.

To visualize how the robots move, take your hand and make a variety of gestures—a fist, a flattened palm, a peace symbol—as quickly as you can while twisting and turning your wrist abruptly. In that way, the robots rush and pause, rush and pause, with something of the grace of a hand, something of the clumsiness of a dinosaur, and perhaps a little dinosaurian menace, particularly since they do their work behind cages, as if they might break free. The cages are to keep workers from walking too close to the scope of the robots, which could crush them just as effectively as movie robots, although without the malice.

After each task is done, while the freshly welded car section moves away and a new one takes its place, the robots draw back and settle into a kind of repose, their welding beaks tucked under their bodies, as if resting after their exertions. What is actually happening is that since impurities build up on the circular copper welding contacts, the robots are cleaned automatically after every welding.

The robots are not blind, but use lasers to look at what they're doing. The pieces they are assembling are not all the same—there is, for instance, a half millimetre variance in the metal door panels, and those half millimetres can add up, so the robots need to adjust. At one station, car roofs are being lowered into body assemblies and welded. The robots first position the roof for the best fit, so that it is as perfectly centred as it can be, then burn it into place.

Sometimes different types of car go through the line at the same time. The body of the new Ford Five Hundred can slide into place, be attended to by the welding robots, and then be followed by a Freestyle—a different sized body that requires its own unique pattern of welds. The Ford engineers are immensely proud of this. Until very recently, an assembly line would have to shut down for weeks or months to re-tool for a new line of cars. This is a revolution. Like the stockpiled lathe set-ups at Cooper, the changing production line at Ford is a reminder that one way factories stay in business is by minimizing the time they spend preparing to make things.

In the process of welding a roof, the only time humans intervene is to remove the roof section from the rack of incoming parts and place it into a frame where the robot can pick it up. The arrival of that roof section—a square piece of metal set on a rack—demonstrates the second great task at Ford assembly: getting the right part to the right place at the right time.

This is more difficult than it sounds; the delivery of parts is almost as complex a challenge as the construction of the cars themselves. A chance discovery in the dusty stock pilings at Cooper can lead, fairly quickly, to the designing of a new product: a bin of old, wooden perfume-bottle stoppers can inspire the creation of a lamp with a bamboo-like base made of stacks of those stoppers. Nothing can be haphazard at Ford. Parts arrive continually. They have to, since Ford tries to have only enough inventory to keep the plant operating for three hours.

The three-hour turnaround is an incredible feat. It means, when the morning shift arrives for work, the parts they'll be installing after lunch are just arriving at the plant, and those they'll need by quitting time are still on the trucks, heading to the plant. Ford does this because it costs money to hold inventory, and reducing the time a part is in Ford's possession to the barest minimum serves to narrow the gap between when a part is paid for, and when it goes out into the world and earns its keep as a car, helping draw to Ford the $7,000 average profit it makes on every vehicle it sells.

The consequences of such a quick turnaround time is increased risk: if one of those 2,500 parts is missing, production stops—cars are assembled in a fixed order, from the frame up, and a single absent or defective component can bring the $1 billion plant to a halt. Most of the factory floor space is taken up not with the production line, but with one vast loading dock, with forklift trucks hurrying, say, racks of bumpers to where they are needed. Floors are painted with yellow lane markers, and there are stop signs and street lights. Pallets are high with colour-coded bins—bright purples and greens and reds—and computers keep track of where every part is at all times, even as they journey to the plant.

The parts don't have far to travel. It would be impossible to keep to the three-hour inventory rule, if they did. Sixty per cent of the parts are made in what Ford calls 'the Chicago Manufacturing Campus', a dozen suppliers, employing another 1,400 people, encamped around the assembly plant—companies with far-less famous names such as Facil LLC, Flex-N-Gate, Plastech Engineered Products Inc., and Summit Polymers. Ford estimates that, by having the suppliers right there, half a mile from the assembly plant, they save fifty dollars in shipping costs on each new car built.

Even the transit of the arriving parts from the loading bays to the assembly line was given careful study. 'We used Euclidian drawings to show exactly how far it takes to get material from one area to the next,' said Couey.