Stories by the fireside’s Post

A Bomber an Hour In the 1940s when America was being drawn into the growing war, their military was quite unprepared. They needed a large number of B-24 bomber airplanes but they were able to build only 1 a day. There was no way they would win the war with this scale of production and their own studies showed many bottlenecks. US Government asked Ford Motor Company to manufacture the center and outer wing sections. Henry Ford sent Charles Sorensen to assess the feasibility of making those components. Charles saw that the manufacturing was extremely inefficient. Every plane was made differently, and every part needed adjustment. It was impossible to turn out two planes alike. He told the Air Force officer that Ford’s assembly line won’t be compatible with the non-standard way of making airplanes. The officers asked, “if you had to make the whole plane, how would you do it? Charles said, "I'll have something for you tomorrow morning." Charles knew that comparing a Ford car with a bomber was like comparing a garage with a skyscraper. But he also knew that the same fundamentals apply to making a car, an electric egg beater, a wristwatch, or an airplane. Charles thought about only one thing: Go back to the basics. Break the design into essential units and make a separate production layout for each, build and deliver units in sequence to the final assembly line.  In just one night, using his notes from the day, he applied thirty-five years of production experience to design the factory. At 4 AM he pencil sketched on the hotel notepad his factory design: a factory that would be mile long and a quarter mile wide, the biggest single industrial building ever. He showed it to Henry Ford in the morning, who agreed with the design. Based on his pencil sketch and calculations, the Air Force approved an investment of $200 million to make the Willow Run plant. It was made operational in just 18 months. A factory that used 500,000 parts, and 30,000 components, had 35,000 employees and made over 20 fighter planes a day, putting a total of 8,800 planes in the air where they would have struggled to put even 500. #operationalexcellence #efficiency #transformation