'Body-Construction Nirvana'
The Michigan Assembly Plant boasts technology that "represents a significant step forward in our flexible manufacturing strategy," Tetreault said.
The plant uses cutting-edge simulation software to build new vehicles in a virtual factory -- enabling Ford engineers, operators and product-development personnel "to evaluate the tooling and the product interfaces with the tooling well-before costly installations that have to be revised when we're launching."
"We generally get it pretty right when we install the tools," Tetreault said. "This level of collaboration not only allows us to reduce mistakes, but it also significantly improves our quality and it enables a speed of execution that we can launch a new vehicle now from the first Job 1 to full production in about 40 days.
"The industry standard is probably closer to 180 now."
Still, the most dramatic shifts toward flexible manufacturing have taken place in Ford's body shops, where the automaker is "headed toward what I like to call body-construction nirvana."
At least 80% of the robotic equipment in Ford's newly flexible body shops can be programmed to produce vehicles of any size and any configuration, Tetreault noted.
"This is significant because body construction has long been a limiting factor in the ability to add or change products in our facilities," he said.
" ... In plants where we did have some flexibility, where we produce a sedan and SUV, for example, if we were building 80% SUVs and 20% sedans, and sales and marketing said, 'Well, that's really nice guys, but we need 80% sedans and 20% SUVs,' it took us months to change all the tooling required to do that.
It was not flexible at all."
With reprogrammable tooling, though, "we can put any body side down that line -- it doesn't matter what the vehicle looks like, doesn't matter what the size of it is."
"Vehicle to vehicle, we can change what we're building," Tetreault said. "We've never been able to do that before."
Similar transformations have been taking place at most of Ford's other North American assembly plants as well, and Tetreault noted that nearly half of Ford's transmission and engine plants around the world "are capable of building several architectures at the same time."
At Ford's transmission plant in Van Dyke, Mich., for example, the automaker produces six-speed automatic transmissions and continuously variable electric-hybrid transmissions on the same line.
Ford previously bought the hybrid transmissions from a supplier in Japan, Tetreault noted. But given the dramatic swings in hybrid-vehicle sales based on the rise and fall of gasoline prices, "we decided that we should innovate this and do it ourselves."
"Now as the manufacturing head, I don't care what sales does -- I can build whatever they want," Tetreault said. "If they want 35% hybrids, we can do that. If they want 2% hybrids, we can do that. And we can substitute the other transmissions that they do want.
"We've never been able to do that before either."
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