Ford Furthers Flexible Manufacturing Effort

Manufacturing Engineering, Jul 2004

DEALS, OPENINGS, ACQUISITIONS, PARTNERSHIPS, ORDERS, EXPANSIONS, AWARDS

As part of its company-wide flexible systems buildup, Ford Motor Co. (Dearborn, MI) has invested $350 million in new agile manufacturing equipment installed at the automaker's recently reopened Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 at its three-plant Cleveland manufacturing site.

Idled since December 2000, Ford's Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 was refurbished with agile, flexible manufacturing systems including the latest agile Cross Huller (Sterling Heights, MI, and Essen, Germany) CNC machines used in powertrain manufacturing, producing automotive engine blocks, cylinder heads, crankshafts, and transmission components. The move is part of Ford's push to save $2 billion in costs with agile systems (see "Ford's Flexible Push" in the September 2003 issue of Manufacturing Engineering), with the new agile lines being identical to systems already installed in Ford's other flexible powertrain manufacturing sites worldwide, says Roman Krygier, Ford group vice president, Global Manufacturing and Quality.

Ford's re-opening of Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1, which originally opened in 1951, saved 800 autoworkers' jobs at the site with three separate facilities (two engine plants and a casting facility) that in total employ nearly 5000 people. In doing so, Ford refurbished the old plant by raising the roofline over a 372,000 ft^sup 2^ (34,596 m^sup 2^) section by 4' (1.2 m). The roofraising, said to be the construction industry's largest roof-raising of any kind, was made to accommodate installation of new material-handling equipment.

"It's not every day we are able to save a plant and completely revitalize it," Krygier notes. "Cleveland joins the lean plants that Ford expects to realize $2 billion in savings. This is part of the standardization that's at the heart of lean."

Engine output at Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 is projected to be 325,000 units a year, with the 800 employees working at the plant being the same employment level as when the facility closed. The facility will build the new Ford Duratec V-6 engines used in the company's 2005 Ford Five Hundred and Mercury Montego sedans, and in the Ford Freestyle model.