Assembly line

According to Henry Ford: The principles of assembly are these: (1) Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in the process of finishing.

[3] In the simple assembly line balancing problem the aim is to assign a set of tasks that need to be performed on the workpiece to a sequence of workstations.

Major planning problems for operating assembly lines include supply chain integration, inventory control and production scheduling.

[5] Adam Smith discussed the division of labour in the manufacture of pins at length in his book The Wealth of Nations (published in 1776).

At the peak of its efficiency in the early 16th century, the Arsenal employed some 16,000 people who could apparently produce nearly one ship each day and could fit out, arm, and provision a newly built galley with standardized parts on an assembly-line basis.

The automatic flour mill built by Oliver Evans in 1785 was called the beginning of modern bulk material handling by Roe (1916).

[7][8] Probably the earliest industrial example of a linear and continuous assembly process is the Portsmouth Block Mills, built between 1801 and 1803.

The assembly line area was called 'The Long Shop' on account of its length and was fully operational by early 1853.

The boiler was brought up from the foundry and put at the start of the line, and as it progressed through the building it would stop at various stages where new parts would be added.

[13] Hounshell (1984) shows a c. 1885 sketch of an electric-powered conveyor moving cans through a filling line in a canning factory.

He reported the idea to Peter E. Martin, soon to be head of Ford production, who was doubtful at the time but encouraged him to proceed.

Some of the groundwork for such development had recently been laid by the intelligent layout of machine tool placement that Walter Flanders had been doing at Ford up to 1908.

[17] The assembly line, driven by conveyor belts, reduced production time for a Model T to just 93 minutes[18] by dividing the process into 45 steps.

[24]Charles E. Sorensen, in his 1956 memoir My Forty Years with Ford, presented a different version of development that was not so much about individual "inventors" as a gradual, logical development of industrial engineering: What was worked out at Ford was the practice of moving the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product.

Only japan black would dry fast enough, forcing the company to drop the variety of colours available before 1914, until fast-drying Duco lacquer was developed in 1926.

[6] Ford's complex safety procedures—especially assigning each worker to a specific location instead of allowing them to roam about—dramatically reduced the rate of injury.

[6] The massive demand for military hardware in World War II prompted assembly-line techniques in shipbuilding and aircraft production.

As William S. Knudsen (having worked at Ford,[17] GM and the National Defense Advisory Commission) observed, "We won because we smothered the enemy in an avalanche of production, the like of which he had never seen, nor dreamed possible.

These goals appear altruistic; however, it has been argued that they were implemented by Ford in order to reduce high employee turnover: when the assembly line was introduced in 1913, it was discovered that "every time the company wanted to add 100 men to its factory personnel, it was necessary to hire 963" in order to counteract the natural distaste the assembly line seems to have inspired.

[29] Sociological work has explored the social alienation and boredom that many workers feel because of the repetition of doing the same specialized task all day long.

Marxists argue that performing repetitive, specialized tasks causes a feeling of disconnection between what a worker does all day, who they really are, and what they would ideally be able to contribute to society.

Furthermore, Marx views these specialised jobs as insecure, since the worker is expendable as soon as costs rise and technology can replace more expensive human labour.

[31] Since workers have to stand in the same place for hours and repeat the same motion hundreds of times per day, repetitive stress injuries are a possible pathology of occupational safety.