Ford plant empowers employees

Focus on line workers' suggestions boosts quality, reliability at Kansas City factory

By Eric Mayne / The Detroit News

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Four years ago, when it came to quality, Ford Motor Co.’s Kansas City assembly plant would not make anyone’s list of the best.

Today, that has changed dramatically.

By paying attention to detail and empowering workers, Ford has sharply improved the quality of models built at the plant, reduced production costs and raised customer satisfaction with the F-150 — Ford’s most profitable vehicle. The changes have generated $4.3 million in savings at the Kansas City plant in just 13 months.

Excellence is now measured in millimeters at the plant. The factory’s 5,800 workers exhibit an attitude far different from the cavalier atmosphere that prevailed during the 1990s.

The change is easily seen on the factory floor. Consider Shane Murphy. Under Ford’s quality enhancement program, he analyzed bumper installation on the plant’s F-150 pickup assembly line. Engineering specs allowed for an alignment variation of up to 7 millimeters when the left side is compared with the right — less than the length of a five-letter word on this page.

“The plant decided that wasn’t good enough for the customer,” Murphy said. So he and his co-workers refined the installation process to enhance and perfect bumper “symmetry.”

Bruce Bittle, chairman of the plant’s bargaining unit, said it wasn’t always like this. For most of Kansas City’s 51-year history, employees didn’t consider themselves stakeholders because there was no way for them to become agents of change.

Today, with the plant’s management focused on empowering employees, the automaker ranks Kansas City — which built 491,000 vehicles last year and will exceed 500,000 in 2004 — among its most reliable and high-quality plants.

It has accomplished the feat while building the most complex product mix for a Detroit automaker — a mission made simpler by Ford’s flexible manufacturing system that reduces model changeover costs by up to 15 percent.

Instead of retooling for new launches, Ford reprograms cells of robots to perform different operations.

In addition to Ford’s F-150 pickup — which is available in so many configurations, it is assembled 46 different ways — the Kansas City plant builds the Ford Escape and Mazda Tribute SUVs.

The turning point in the plant’s fortunes came with the implementation of the Ford Production System seven years ago. Based on strict process control and employee empowerment designed to foster steady improvement, the program was inspired by the Toyota Production System — which Ford executives point out was jump-started by Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno’s study of Henry Ford’s manufacturing philosophy.

“Around 2002, the plant started to click,” plant manager David Savchetz said.

On the Harbour scale, Kansas City ranks second among small SUV plants, taking 22.1 hours to build a vehicle; and fifth in the pickup segment, at 24 hours per unit.

Roman Krygier, head of manufacturing at Ford, forecasts similar scores for 2004 — a crowning achievement for the pickup line.

“We had some issues, maybe, regarding increased labor content,” Krygier said, referring to the new F-150. “But the team has done a tremendous job in terms of taking waste out of the system. We believe we’re pretty much going to come out where our old vehicle was. That’s outstanding.”


You can reach Eric Mayne at (313) 222-2443 or emayne@detnews.com.