Americans, December 26, 2018: How clever the world feels today when it talks about its accomplishments in the fields of manufacturing and industrial design: efficiency, cost reduction, innovation, automation, worker incentive, job-time reduction, kaizen.
Yet Henry Ford was doing it all a century ago.
But there is one colossal difference between then and now.
Today, auto manufacturing bosses and “lean practices” directors essentially are smoothing the rough edges. Mass production has been perfected to the point today that improving it is a matter of degree: improving safety, reducing scrap, eliminating wasteful steps, getting four employees to do what six did a year earlier.
In 1908, Ford’s workplace changes were revolutionary. The company moved from a 19th century manufacturing paradigm to a 20th century one.
First, a car frame was carried into a clear area of the production floor and rested on sawhorses. Parts were made elsewhere in the factory, or by outside vendors, and runners brought them to the vehicle chassis that sat on sawhorses. Two or three workers hovered over the stationary chassis, bolting on the car body when the chassis was completed.
In the years immediately following Ford’s incorporation in 1903, such labor-intensive practices gave the factory at first only two or three completed cars a day and gradually a few dozen a day.
To the production bosses of the time, the only clear path to greater productivity was through labor: hiring more workers, providing more work space, pushing the workers to move faster, and waiting for workers to become faster through experience and practice.
As long as labor and floor space were cheap, output could grow. Theoretically, Ford could have built a dozen little factories, each producing a low daily volume.
But Henry Ford had a bigger goal. He wanted to put the entire world behind his steering wheels. To do that, he recognized, he must bring down the price of his cars to be within reach of the entire world. That meant not just building cars in larger numbers but building them at a much higher degree of productivity and plant efficiency. More cars at a lower cost of production would translate to more cars at a lower selling cost.
In 1910, Ford opened a large plant in Highland Park that started the process. The 60-acre factory focused on speeding up production by accelerating the movement of parts. The plant’s tool-and-die shop was enormous and turned out large numbers of parts-making tools. Rather than centralizing parts production, the tools were positioned close to where the vehicles were being assembled, shortening the distance between component and final assembly.
As Highland Park’s output gained momentum, a group of production managers continued tinkering with the process in search of more productivity and less wasted effort, or muda, as Japanese efficiency engineers would call it several decades later. The Ford managers included Henry Ford’s assistant, ; one of Edsel Ford’s schoolteachers, Clarence Avery; factory foreman William Klann; and a production supervisor with a mind for efficiency and a background in machinery, Walter Flanders.
Clusters of vehicle production were lined up in a row more than 200 feet long. Parts runners moved from cluster to cluster down the line delivering a single set of parts as assemblers needed them. The next runners arrived just behind them with the next parts, and so on. In this way, Highland Park was the opposite of a moving line: The car remained stationary; the workers moved.
The group visited other industrial operations in search of ideas. One of the most impressive ideas came from a Chicago slaughterhouse. There, heavy sides of beef hung on hooks that rolled from worker to worker through the butchering process. It didn’t immediately occur to auto manufacturing observers that such a conveyer system might work for an entire car. But it did occur to them that their heavy engines might roll more easily from worker to worker on an overhead conveyer.
The Highland Park group then hit on the idea of moving the multipart Ford ignition system along a conveyer belt, where workers remained stationary and added specific parts as it passed. Then the transmission got the same treatment, and then the axles.
The Ford tinkerers, though, could see the potential of moving metal rather than people.
In 1913, the group took up the idea of moving the cars as they were assembled. At first, the problem with the idea was perceptual: How do you gently move the heavy hulk of an iron and steel car chassis? Their answer was to try dragging it with a rope. But as workers experimented with the idea, the heaviest ropes available repeatedly broke under the strain.
The idea eventually evolved into a chain-pull system that dragged multiple chassis along until their wheels could be affixed. Parts were positioned along the line as the cars passed.
By October 1913, Ford was able to pull the wraps off of a redesigned production system like no other. The growing list of changes would enable the Highland Park workers to spend less time on each car. The flow made production planning more predictable for the company and its suppliers. The relative steadiness of the flow enabled factory bosses to dissect what was taking place. Rather than merely pressing workers to move faster, the company could embrace the more scientific industrial engineering methods of efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor. Foremen could employ motion studies and measure the length of each job to identify ways to shorten them.
In short, the factory had begun a transformation. It would cease to be a den of craftsmen working at their own paces and become a clockwork of inter-related lines and schedules.
More important, Henry Ford would begin to get his wish of more cars at lower prices.
Within six months, Highland Park was building more than 1,000 Model T’s a day. Ford enhanced the floor design to accommodate four separate vehicle lines and jacked up production to 3,000 a day. That output level continued to climb for the next seven or eight years. By the time Ford switched to the Model A in 1927, the company had produced 15 million Model T’s – priced as low as $260 each. The first Model T had sold for $850.
Ford did not invent the idea of mass production. Credit for that probably belongs to Samuel Colt and the U.S. government. In the second half of the 1800s, the federal government had attempted to make its weaponry more durable by requesting gun makers such as Colt to make their guns out of interchangeable parts. Making interchangeable parts in large numbers made it possible – necessary, in fact – to produce them on calibrated, repeating machinery. As with car sales, gun sales would be stimulated by producing them in large enough volumes to reduce their production cost.
But Ford had taken the ideas of interchangeable parts, precision metalworking machinery, conveyer systems and time management and combined them all into one schematic under one roof. The Detroit that predated Ford’s factories had prided itself on high-quality bicycle manufacturing and carriage making. The craftsmanship and tooling knowledge involved there found their way into Ford’s mass production of cars.
But bicycles and carriages had not excited the young 20th century American mind the way the automobile did. Unbounded market demand had never whipped carriage production into an altered state. Henry Ford understood that Americans – or people anywhere, for that matter – would buy a car if only they could. With a $2,500 price tag, only a few would buy. With an $850 price tag, many more would buy. At $260, they would buy them by the millions.
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