<VV> RE: Wise Gal

mygroups mygroups at frontiernet.net
Sun Aug 20 10:20:40 EDT 2006


>Now, a question for the manufacturing engineers in the crowd. Ford has announced it is closing a half dozen plants until the end of the year. I'm assuming that means they'll be "mothballing" them for a while. The question is, what do you do to mothball something as huge and complicated as an automobile assembly plant? 
>  
>
We build assembly line equipment like Ford uses (we built some of their 
current equipment in fact). The restart will be way more complicated 
than the shutdown. They'll prob use the last of the stampings and build 
the final chassis. And for the simpler machines just turn off the air, 
turn off the power and empty any water separators. On robots and such 
they'll prob "home" them, turn off the the air, shutdown the computers, 
and turn off the power. The parts bins might be relocated to a warehouse 
for safe keeping. Restart will be the reverse but some equipment might 
be balky for a bit and require building some discard parts to test their 
settings. Our equipment assembles components and at different stations 
quality checks them. Sometimes a few parts have to be runoff to test any 
machine adjustments. Sometimes this is easy (few parts) and sometimes on 
more complicated lines might require a couple dozen parts (usually not 
on a line that was previously used).

The challenge comes when machine operators cannot setup their own 
machine due to complexity or union rules. Then the manufacturer might 
have a limited number of technicians running around "putting out fires". 
Then over the first few weeks the problems taper off. All supports the 
idea of not buying a first year vehicle doesn't it?

Anyhow, shutdown work stations (remove air and power), and then shutdown 
compressors and maybe shutdown machine power circuits for safety 
(lighting would prob be on other circuits).

I suppose if they are temporarily closing factories they will be paying 
their people to stay home until their oversupply of vehicles passes. I 
heard the other day that some of the car manufacturers have 70+ days of 
inventory built up already (imports and domestics both).

Anybody able to explain how they save money paying people to stay at 
home and shutting down the factories? Labor is a cost and the factories 
are not paying for themselves... <???>

Chris in Cookeville


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