[Keith Seymore]

Alvin - your post is timely.

I was in Wentzville last week, building 2016 non Saleable G vans down the current production assembly line, and was reminded of this comment:

Originally Posted by Keith Seymore

Add a trailer hitch where it doesn’t belong, or (maybe) substitute an engine of the same size/shape/family as the broadcast item? Possibly, but all the inspectors (a dozen people) would have to be in on the deal too. Add an option with wiring, coordination across multiple areas or some other complexity? Probably not. It is nearly impossible to do even with a team of dedicated employees who are getting paid to make it happen. For a bunch of impromptu changes initiated on the fly? Even more impossible. If it can get screwed up - it will.

Holy crap - what a mess! Somehow one of our 2016 Body-in-White front motor compartments was sent down the wrong accumulator line and so our pilot builds were out of sequence when they came out the other end. Fortunately the conveyor shipped an empty carrier (which it is never supposed to do) so we took a random 2016 motor compartment and stuck it at the end of our pilot builds, and then just relabeled our trucks, to get back in sequence.

Unfortunately all that horsing around got the regular production jobs out of sequence, too. I had to stand line side and physically give direction (ie, "...that one's right, that one's right, that one's wrong, that one's right", etc) until we emptied the system and started over.

At one point I counted 9 people standing around from the various disciplines (engineering, plant management, planning and skilled trades) watching one guy push the buttons on the conveyor, attempting to fix the issue. It took pretty much all morning to get back on track.

We can build a million vehicles pretty easily, but do anything to disrupt that and you can potentially have a mess on your hands.

K