Ford automation warehouse systems

Good morning! Today I want to talk you about the automation systems you can find in Ford motor company, or at least, the two more interesting systems, in my opinion, while managing a big storage as Ford in Almussafes, Valencia.

All my family has been working at Ford for more than 40 years, so I am a kind of a Ford child, so that’s the reason why I’m always driving Ford cars, for those of you who have seen my car, or past cars.

When I was 16 I was offered the opportunity to do an internship at Ford during the summer break, from June to the beginning of August. It wasn’t the type of internship you do during your university studies, but a kind of internship to understand how the company of our parents was working. It was 2009, I was young and I didn’t know much about life( as now), so I was amazed by the robots and all the technology of Ford but something that surprised me the most was the warehouse where they used to have the smaller parts (like screws, nuts…). They had it automatized as in this video, but in the biggest place you can imagine and with more than 8 different robots that were supplying different desk that then were trasportedthis parts to the different plants where the assembly was made.

I’ve been trying to look for their system now, but there isn’t much information about it, nevertheless, I have found an interesting system that is working in the engines plant to manage the warehouse and make the inventory of the different engine parts.

Here you can see how all the work is developed by robots that, completely alone, manage the storage:

 

As always, let me know if you want to share something or if you liked it.

TIME OF MEASURING

At present there are many car companies with assembly lines. Ford is one of the most famous assembly lines. This assembly line had its beginnings at the beginning of the 20th century, but the technology involved in these processes has changed a lot as can be seen in the video. The sequence of processes and the material flow of these factories must be perfectly synchronized to avoid wasting time and money.

When designing an assembly line, you must take into account the number of activities to be performed and the proximity between activities. If you want to minimize the distances traveled to minimize the cost, you can design a matrix that relates the activities and identify if: 1) It is absolutely necessary that two activities are together, 2) Especially needed, 3) Important, 4) Certain importance 5) Indifferent, or 6) Harmful. So in the case of a car assembly line it is important the proximity of the materials used in each activity.

To improve the assembly line it is necessary to know the initial times and, once the improvements are implemented, to verify that the changes have reduced the time spent on the activity. There are many tools to study times. You can use the timekeeping (the time should be multiplied by a correction factor, prevent that the timed person sees the timekeeping). It can also be used Methods Time Measurement (MTM) that breaks down the movement in micro movements. Another tool used for large magnitudes is sampling.

Here you have some templates to study times: http://www.systems2win.com/c/timeObservation.htm

The improvement of activities is facilitated through the use of process simulation tools. These tools allow you to make changes in the process and see how these changes affect the process. This reduces the costs of testing on the actual process, allows more testing, and reduces the need for pilot plants.

References:

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fords-assembly-line-starts-rolling

https://www.uclm.es/area/ing_rural/AsignaturaProyectos/Tema%205.pdf

http://www.lean.org/common/display/?o=2192

http://www.mtm.org/

https://www.arenasimulation.com/what-is-simulation/business-process-modeling-software

Image: http://peru21.pe/multimedia/imagen/t-343055