The Assembly Line

Day 194 / 365

The Assembly Line is a method of production in which parts are assembled as they move from workstation to workstation until the finished product is made.

Before the industrial revolution, products would be by one person (or maybe a small team) working one it from start to finish. This had obvious shortcomings

• A single product would take longer to produce.
• One person would have to have all the skills required for the development of the product.

The Assembly line solves this as you now have multiple persons working on a small part of the development of the product.

Suppose you are making sandwiches for a picnic. For that, you need to cut some veggies, butter the pieces of bread, put the veggies on the bread, cut the sandwiches diagonally, and then pack them in the basket.

The older production method would be you doing all these steps your self, can you imagine how messy that would get?

However, you can do it better by making an assembly line. Get some of your friends and assign each one step. Everyone stays in one place, does one job and passes the product along. Less mess, and increased efficiency!

How much faster is the assembly line? We can get an idea about this by looking at the production of the Ford Model T car. Henry Ford was one of the pioneers in the assembly line. By using this process in the production of Model T, the production time for one car was brought down from 12.5 hours to just 90 minutes! They were producing cars so fast that the paint drying was becoming the bottleneck.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Don’t compete, dominate