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Quietly making lots of transmission - Produce - Honda Transmission Manufacturing of America Inc - Statistical Data Included

Automotive Design & Production, Sept, 2001 by Kermit Whitfield

You'd think that a plant in Ohio that produces almost a million transmissions per year would be well known. But have you heard of Honda transmission mfg. of america? we didn't think so. Here's an introduction.

At Christmastime, 1996, while most Honda workers in Ohio were engaged in the rigors of the holiday season, an unlucky few were shepherding 90 truckloads of equipment from Honda's Anna Engine Plant to what was then Bellemar Parts Industries (Russells Point, OH). Their challenge was to transfer Anna's transmission manufacturing capabilities in less than two weeks and provide an uninterrupted flow of parts to their customers. They succeeded and marked their transformation by becoming Honda Transmission Mfg. of America (HTM). Within two years, HTM surpassed the output of its mother plant in Japan, making it the largest automatic transmission production center for Honda in the world. HTM's history is long and circuitous.

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It began life as Bellemar (a name derived from the two closest cities to the plant, Bellefontaine and Marysville) in 1982 with a plant that was located beside the then-brand new Marysville Auto Plant, Honda's first auto manufacturing facility. (In fact, it was Honda's first North American auto parts supplier.) Over its 14-year history, Bellemar produced and eventually spun off myriad different parts such as seats, tire assemblies, exhaust systems, brake and fuel lines, and catalytic converters, before being bought by Honda and beginning its career as a transmission specialist.

The HTM plant is a telling example of Honda's skill at packing a lot of production capacity into a small footprint. The 300,000-[ft.sup.2] facility casts and machines aluminum transmission and torque converter cases and valve bodies, and assembles complete transmissions all under one roof. It produces 4-speed transmissions for the Civic, Accord, and Odyssey models, as well as a more sophisticated 5-speed for the Acura TL, CL and MDX. HTM is on track to produce 930,000 transmissions this year, including those for Honda of Alabama Mfg. which will begin producing Odyssey minivans this fall.

Coaxing more production out of existing equipment, much of which is over 10 years old, is a daily exercise for the, people at HTM. Each department, its own approach, but all mix judicious investment in automation (or de-automation) to remove identified bottlenecks with clever engineering that does more with less.

Casting More

Increased productivity in HTM's casting department begins with the design of the dies themselves. Honda utilizes an intricate die cooling system with more cooling lines than is typical for such dies, and the coolant in those lines is kept at a constant 50 by a chiller system. The colder dies mean faster cycle times. A supplier that makes the same part but uses a tower that only brings the coolant to 80 has a cycle time of 78 seconds. HTM's is 60 seconds.

Similarly, HTM has in effect cut cycle times in half in the casting of the transmission's servo body by employing a two-cavity die that makes two parts in one shot. Assuring the proper flow of molten metal is more difficult to achieve with a two-cavity die, but HTM proudly points out that their scrap rate is even lower than their counterpart plant in Japan, though that facility only uses a one-cavity die. Part of the reason for HTM's casting success is the constant tinkering of its engineers trying to eke out more efficiency. Steve Pape, an engineering coordinator in the Casting Department, says, "On almost every run we try something different: For example, today we tried a new type of shot tip to push the aluminum through. It has a ceramic-coated steel tip that we hope will give us better sealing and lower porosity than the beryllium-copper tip we now use.

Machining More More

In the machining department, HTM has increased capacity the old fashioned way: by adding a new line. But it has also reduced cycle time by replacing humans with part loading robots, and increased flexibility by ousting old hydraulic robots in favor of new simple and more agile electric robots However, one of the biggest boons to the department's productivity is the result of the greater accuracy with which parts it machines are cast and forged. A good example of this is the one-step reaming of the valve body and torque converter case. In the past, the parts had to be drilled before reaming, but the castings are accurate enough now that the drilling operation has been, eliminated, freeing up machining capacity for other things (like the complex 4-wheel-drive transmission and torque converter cases that require far more operations than their 2-wheel-drive counterparts).

Assembling More

The assembly department is reducing down time and increasing throughput by pursuing what seems to be a growing trend: de-automation. That is, they are replacing complex, fully- automated assembly machines with much simpler ones that are human-guided. A case in point is the nutrunner machine for the transmission case. The old machine was completely automatic, but would experience downtime whenever a bolt was misaligned. The new machine is moved into place by a line worker who can quickly detect and fix any misalignments. And reducing downtime is particularly important right now since one of HTM's two assembly lines is running flat out at 2,000 units per day and the other will ramp up by 20% from 1,600 to 2,000 units per day by the end of 2001.

Automotive Industry

Quietly making lots of transmission - Produce - Honda Transmission Manufacturing of America Inc - Statistical Data Included

Automotive Design & Production, Sept, 2001 by Kermit Whitfield

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