Henry Ford – Lean Manufacturing

Henry Ford – Lean Manufacturing

Who Was Henry Ford?

Born on July 30th in 1863, Henry Ford grew up on his parent’s farm in Springwells Township, Michigan along with his four siblings Margaret, Jane, William, and Robert. Rather than staying to take over the farm one day as his father wanted, Ford left home to become an apprentice machinist in Detroit shortly after his mother passed away. Before returning home, he worked with two companies from 1879 to 1882. The first being at James F. Flower and Bros., and then the Detroit Dry Dock Co. Once that period in his life was over, he returned to the family farm to operate the Westinghouse portable steam engine being used. This clunky machine was part of the transitional period when people had begun using machinery instead of horses. Although, the steam engine still relied on horses to pull it from place to place where power was required to complete tasks.

With Ford’s experience on the Westinghouse portable steam engine, he went to work at Westinghouse’s Facility. He had the job of servicing their steam engines. During all this, Ford was also studying at the Goldsmith, Bryant & Stratton Business College in Detroit for bookkeeping. In 1992, 17 years after his first exposure to this new type of vehicle, Ford finished building his very own gas-powered motor car. The Quadricycle as he called it was one of the more earlier versions of his later invention, the Model T, He drove this vehicle 1,000 miles from 1995-1996. A staggering number to think about since it was one of the first of its kind and only able to go 10-20 miles an hour.

The Development of Mass Production Assembly Lines Did you know at the height of production, Henry Ford’s factories saw a Model T roll off the moving-chassis assembly line every 24 seconds? Not only that, but these seemingly expensive commodities were available to the middle-class household! Up until Ford made his gas-powered family automobile, steam powered vehicles were only available, and only attainable by the wealthy. Now that’s an incredible feat for the time. What became known as Fordism, Henry was able to merge both high wages for workers as well as the production of inexpensive goods for consumers. The chief example of this being the price difference from the first year of production in 1909 at $825 per vehicle to its last year in 1927 at $360 per vehicle. Add the fact that worker’s wages at the motor company more than doubled to $5 a day, giving his own employees the power to also purchase the cars that they created every day.The cost of a Model T in today’s dollars went from as high as $23,763 all the way down to $5,363 almost 20 years later. Ford’s goal was to create a car that American families could afford and enjoy. How did he do it you ask? Let’s dive into the basis of what we recognize today as the beginnings of Lean manufacturing.

Creating the Model-T Let’s run through the process of making a Model T automobile. The beauty of Ford’s process was that every part was the exact same. Interchangeable parts were becoming more and more popular with manufacturers at the time because of the ability to mass produce finished product and have the quality be the same across the board. This was not like the days when gunsmiths handcrafted every firearm they made. Instead, production was streamlined and involved a whole team of people. Creating automobiles was fast and most importantly, required exactly 84 employees.Inspired by local meat-packing plants in Chicago as well as a mill that he had witnessed using a conveyor system, Ford began to experiment with his current production line. It started off as laying all the parts on either side of the vehicle and moving the unfinished Model T with skids.Eventually Ford perfected his system, involving exactly 84 steps and 84 employees who were trained to do the same task perfectly every time. The simplicity of each task meant that there’s wasn’t a particular need for skilled labor since it just required a short training period.Workplace Organization Guide: Learn simple strategies for long-term

Henry Ford’s accomplishment with the Model T should primarily be attributed to his insatiable drive to learn and continually improve. Supported by a couple of designers and a team of manufacturing specialists, he never stopped looking for better and more effective ways to design and build his Model T. Every breakthrough they had, came from them being inquisitive and gleaning whatever knowledge they could find from other industries. It was their ability to see and learn from these other industries and apply it to the design and their manufacturing operations that made them so successful. When Henry Ford learned about a vanadium alloy that the French were using in their racing cars, he made every effort to get his hands on it. This steel led to a major rethink of the design and allowed the Model T to be made stronger and lighter than other cars.

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