Ford tore down and retooled the legendary Rouge Factory to make way for the aluminum alloy 2015 F-150
--
Just after midnight on August 23, 2014, the Dearborn Truck Plant, on the site of Henry Ford’s legendary Rouge factory, went offline to begin the largest transformation of any manufacturing facility in the company’s history. Ford’s decision to change the body of the F-150 — the company’s most valuable and iconic vehicle — from steel to aluminum alloy was a four-year process that involved no shortage of nail chewing, because to pull it off required, essentially, building an entirely new factory where a perfectly good one was already standing. And to do that, Ford had to actually stop production of the truck in Dearborn.
-Every day that the Rouge was closed translated into millions in lost profits, so the changeover needed to happen as quickly as possible. Ford management settled on eight weeks. That’s how much time, Bruce Hettle, Vice President, North America Manufacturing, and his logistics team would have to strip out hundreds of tons of machinery, install an entire new line of assembly equipment that included 500 custom robots, implement a closed-loop aluminum recycling system, and build a new stamping plant. Actually, Hettle says, only four of those weeks were allotted to the tear down and build-up. He needed the rest of the time to test the gear, build some prototypes, and prepare to re-launch the Dearborn Truck Plant at full-production of the all-new, aluminum-bodied 2015 F-150 by November 1, 2014.
- -“We planned it literally down to the minute, with micro-micro precision,” Hettle says. Two minutes after the last 2014 truck rolled off the line on August 24, skilled workers who’d been positioned nearby on the floor began unbolting equipment to be carted out. It took only five days to prep the site, to remove thousands of tons of metal manufacturing gear (much of it be repurposed at other factories), but in some cases, new installation began within minutes of an area being cleared. “It was very synchronous,” Hettle says.
-To build out the new line, the logistics team stationed 1,100 semi tractors filled with equipment around southeastern Michigan, and as soon as the factory was stripped bare, those trucks rolled out for Dearborn. The first 300 trailers were actually parked around the vast Rouge property, but once those were unloaded, the other 800 were dispatched, one after another, timed just right as to avoid back-ups entirely.
-What’s more, Ford anticipated that a sudden influx of trucks and heavy machinery around Dearborn — on Labor Day weekend, no less — could snarl traffic, so the company worked with Michigan’s Department of Transportation to plan routes, set schedules, and even in some cases add traffic lights where problems could occur. To track the armada of trucks, RFID tags were attached to each so that Hettle and his team in the command center had a real-time picture of where every vehicle was, at every moment, so that problems could be identified quickly and solved efficiently. Time lost was time that Ford wasn’t building F-150s, Hettle says. “It was all about time to market.”
-
The all new aluminum alloy F-150 body mid assembly
And in the end, the plan worked perfectly. Within weeks, Ford was building prototypes of the new truck and on November 11, the Dearborn Truck Plant was officially reopened. Every day since, more than 1,400 F-150s have rolled off its line, at a rate of 60-per-hour. “It’s a milestone we will always talk about, making the decision to transform the truck to aluminum, and to remake the Rouge,” Hettle says. Not that his work was done. Six months later, Ford repeated the process in Kansas City, at the country’s other facility where F-150s are built. As of May 1, 2015 both plants are back up and running at full capacity, shipping trucks to dealers worldwide.
-“It’s a real source of pride for us,” Hettle says. “I’ve been involved in a lot of launches, but this clearly was the largest product transformation that we’ve ever taken on as a company.” In the process, Ford learned how to refit a giant factory, modernize in a short time, and mass produce using aluminum. “We’ve demonstrated our speed to market, and our speed of transformation in manufacturing,” Hettle says. “To do this to an industry standard, in record time, is really a leap forward.”
-
-
from Car and Driver Blog http://ift.tt/1eiCycK
via Agya
