Why Did Henry Ford Use Assembly Line?

Andrews Corporation’s production department coordinates and facilitates the assembly lines for the products. There are two crucial factors that the production department focuses on: automation and production capacity.

One of the biggest needs for improvement was the assembly process. Although several changes were made throughout the years, quality and efficiency still fell below expectations. Hinrichs implemented the newly developed assembly which consists of two separate work stations that allowed operators in the adjacent stations to share the expensive balancer machine. These assembly cells were much more efficient as workers were no longer forced to wait for another person or machine in the process. Each cell was built like the other with quick turn set-up which created flexibility in the process while also reducing tooling inventory by almost a half. Now cells

In a nut shell, Price claimed the Industrial Revolution created the division of labor (2004). The Division of Labor is perfectly encapsulated by the Henry Ford model of the assembly line (Price, 2004). Each worker on the assembly line only needs to know how to attach or inspect the operation of their assigned part on to the object as a whole, and not how to assemble the entire product. This allows for any unskilled person to be taught how to attach their doodad onto the doohickey without knowing what the doohickey does or operates. This is capitalism in the basic form of the ideal. Capitalism desires economic efficiency, thus the assembly line is a perfect example of the rise of unskilled factory workers and the decline of skilled craftsmen during the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism.

The assembly line principle as it matured in industrial society however, proved to destroy workers creativity and stifle the very essence of human life. Growth and change. On an assembly line workers are degraded to automatons, performing the same tasks over and over and over. Day in day out, without ever having any knowledge or input into any of the other tasks related to completion of the project. This monotony in the workplace spills over into the daily life of many factory workers and affects how they live their life outside of the factory after the whistle blows as much as it does while they’re on the assembly line.

In the San Francisco assembly line, on the other hand, make some products which the customers ordered. So the products should be unique and high quality. That means to achieve these needs to have high skill. So the workers should be able to adapt their skills in deterrent kind of goods.

Since the current assembly line layout should achieving 100% line efficiency when running at maximum capacity of 215 units. Thus, to operate at target 300 units/day, the current assembly line needs to redesign.

Economically, the Industrial Revolution improved the United States significantly. With new inventions and technology, work ethic increased by 200% and more! Industries began to grow, such as the American Tobacco Company and automobile companies. A major advancement in factories was the assembly line, created by Henry Ford. Since technology made making textiles and other luxuries easier to produce, the

Ford realized that he must change his methods of production in order to decrease the price of his automobiles. His invention of the assembly line actually started before the Model T came out, but Ford did not know it at the time. The Model N was built prior to the Model T. The workers on the Model N automobiles placed the parts in order along the floor while the “under-construction” auto was on skids and moved down the line. The workers placed their respective parts on the machine as it passed by. For the Model T, Ford tried to make his process even better. He broke the assembly process into 84 small steps. On top of this, workers were trained for only one of the 84 steps. By having a machine that could make interchangeable parts faster than any human, the process accelerated quickly and there was no shortage on supplies. With the combination of the new parts machine, line of workers trained per step, and an order of parts, the assembly line was born. Figure 1 below shows the wheels and hubcaps of Model T cars being assembled using the assembly line. The excessive amounts

     In mid-eighteenth-century England the industrial revolution was in full swing. However, workers lived near the level of physical subsistence, and their condition worsened in latter half of the eighteenth century. Monotony and repetition characterized factory work; the tyranny of the factory clock and the pace of the assembly line were beyond the control of all workers. The division of labor, praised by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations as the means to productivity growth and rising living standards, made work so routine that women and children could perform jobs just as easily as men. Business owners logically preferred such workers because they could be hired for less.

The Industrial Revolution, which took place from the 18th to 19th centuries, was a period where there were predominantly agricultural or rural societies in America became industrialized and urban. The industrialization of rule-populated areas originally started in Britain in the late seventeen-hundred early eighteen hundreds. Before the Industrial Revolution manufacturing was often done in people’s homes, using hand held tools or basic machines in the house . You can compare them to the modern day dishwasher or washing machine on how basic they are in the average house today. Industrialization marked a shift of power from agriculture and farming to special-purpose machinery, factories, mass production and assembly lines. (ibid) The assembly line is considered to be a major part of the Industrial Revolution because it made the workers running the machines to speed up the process of building. workers were trained to do a specific task in manufacturing a product like for example if the workers were building a car one person would be trained to put the wheel on the car and

Boeing made use of lean techniques in their production system and increased its production by 50% and also reduced its floor space by 40%. Assembling a Boeing 737 is a typical job. Workers should take 367,000 parts, an same number of bolts, rivets, other equipment and 36 miles (58 kilometres) of electrical wire and then keep them all combined to make an airplane [2]. Engineers to machinists were involved in lean (reducing waste) in the factory. By creating an assembly line, aircraft will pass through the workers were they going to concentrate on assembling. Allocating all employees in the factory building and organising special teams helped a lot to solve the errors in the assembly line [2]. In the assembly line, there are eight beacon lights which reflect the production status. If everything is good it shows green colour. If an error occurs, the worker will press a button and the green light will changes to yellow and the panel board will shows the category of the problem(which category it is related to). The worker will pass on to a computer and writes about the problem in a brief manner and the problem should be assigned to special team to solve it within 30 minutes if not, the light turns to purple and the assembly line will shuts down. This moving assembly is the icon of factory’s lean strategies.

With assembly-line production, job skills become highly specific to the technology and procedures used in a given plant. Such jobs are considered semi-skilled because they require a specific skill but one that can be learned in a relatively short time... The organizations of production around an assembly line…and other forms of advanced mechanization are organized under scientific management [where]…the worker was to execute diligently a set of motions engineered to ensure the most efficient performance of a given task. (Hodson, R. & Sullivan, T.A., 2008, p. 27)

We can see that through the division and specialization of labour that Adam Smith’s pin factory

We analyzed a Toshiba assembly line plan for a new subnotebook computer.  The engineering section manager, Toshihiro Nakamura, wants to make changes to the line process as designed by the engineers.  The basic assembly line equipment and space already exist within the Toshiba plant, so the subnotebook assembly process must conform to those preexisting constraints.  Specifically, the assembly line is a straight 14.4-meter conveyor system that can accommodate 8 to 12 workers plus one supporter to aid in the assembly process.  The employees work at assembling for 7.5 hours a day.  The computers are assembled from

The third core competency is Boeing’s dynamic assembly line. This was a valuable change to Boeing because it reduced assembly time by 50%, or from 22 days down to 11 days. The planes move 80 feet every shift and lights determine the status of the assembly line. Dynamic assembly lines are costly to imitate and rare due to the size of the plant and the components used in order to pull such a large craft throughout the building. The only substitute of a dynamic assembly line is a static assembly line, and the dynamic one performs much more efficiently.