“AMC could be regarded as the mother of ‘flexabile manufacturing’ due to the wide variety of products, with limited facilities to build them.
I took a tour of Kenosha assembly in 75. As I recall, there were two lines, one running a mix of Matador and Hornet and the other a mix of Pacer and Gremlin.
At the head of the line was a huge warehouse where bodies, assembled and painted, were staged on dollies as they came in from the Kenosha and Milwaukee body plants. Two men would select a body from the staging area and push it to the head of the line. As the claw from the overhead conveyor picked up the body, a sheet of code numbers was taken off of the body and the codes typed into a computer terminal. The computer system would then tell the subassembly departments what components to put on the conveyors feeding the assembly line in the right sequence, so that, for instance, senior platform suspension components and a V8 would arrive at the line just as a Matador body approched and a leaf sprung rear axle and a six would arrive to meet a Hornet body.
Amazed me that they had so many people coordinated to tolerate so much variability in what the lines were building.”
— Steve, Curbside Classic
RE:SOURCES
- Steve; 2014. Commentator in “Car Show Classic: 1953 Nash Statesman — AMC’s DNA.” Curbside Classic. Comment posted January 25 at 7:49 a.m.; accessed October 14, 2018.
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