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halewood.qxd 24/11/06 10:21 am Page 23 operator will work on line, thereby replicating line other parts of the PAG organisation and to suppliers. movement conditions. We don't allow anyone onto a H e re, people learn what lean is all about, s ays moving line until they can go through a number of Straughan. They come from many backgrounds and cycles of achieving cycle time and quality on both the X- functions and the most important part of the course is Type and the Freelander. Only then are they able to go, towards the end when they spend a day making cars. assisted, on line. They build a car and are asked for a report on possible There are certain aspects of the Freelander build improvements. We take these reports very seriously where the training has been made as robust as possible because they are often from people from outside who and much time and money has been invested. The have a fresh eyes approach. We teach them about pace, electrics on the vehicle are extremely complicated, efficiency and basics like how to hold a tool correctly, explains Straughan. Against every connector on the car, and we get back some brilliant ideas. For example, it and there are 164 of them, we did a risk assessment of could be that a 55 year-old designer from our design what could go wrong. We assessed the ergonomics of area at Gaydon comes to us to be immersed in lean each connector, whether it needed to be fool-proofed. techniques. He goes and builds a car and then tells us Was it possible to reverse it and put it in the wrong way? ways to improve the job he's just done for the past eight D o the colours of the connectors help us in the hours. assembly? We then trained everybody in the care points Freelander production has seen the Halewood factory for that particular assessment. rever t to a two shift pattern, except for the press shop The involvement of Halewood employees in the new which works three shifts in order to supply other Jaguar vehicle was the earliest ever of a manufacturing team in and Land Rover plants. Whilst the X-Type and the a Land Rover product. Some two years before Job One, a Freelander are produced on the same line in the paint core group joined Land Rover's Design and Engineering shop and in final trim and assembly, this is not true of the team at the company's headquarters in Gaydon to body shop where each vehicle has its own dedicated par ticipate in virtual, advanced and prototype build line. In the body shop, you need to have very flexible stages. We wanted this core team to understand the car tooling to run two models on the same line, explains ver y early on in its conception, Straughan points out. Thomas Klein. Six or seven years ago, that flexible More importantly, we wanted to influence the product. tooling didn't exist. The old body shop was not laid out During the virtual build phase, they were able to offer a in such a way that, with slight tooling changes, we could car builder's perspective on what was being proposed. incorporate a completely different car. It was set up for We had people who had been building the X-Type sitting the X-Type and we had to construct a completely new i n front of a computer with three or four design shop, effectively doubling the area of the old one, to engineers being asked their opinion of the handle the new model. The new, flexible Freelander line manufacturing technique that was being employed to fit also means, of course, that when decisions are being a certain component. When you have a guy who fits made on future models, Halewood is well-placed to b a t te r i e s for a living pointing out that, from an challenge for those contracts. ergonomic perspective, a certain way of fitting the The Freelander body shop has 256 ABB robots which batter y into the Freelander will cause the operator deliver 99 percent spot weld automation. These robots problems, then you need to do it differently. apply over 4,500 spot welds to every Freelander shell, Halewood benefits from an on-site Lean Learning joining together the 420 major panels which make up Academy, a Ford PAG corporate college of which there is t h e finished body. Many of these robots are one in the UK and several in the United States. Not only multifunctional and change their heads to carry out does it train Halewood people, the service is also sold to both welding and manipulating tasks. ABB has the 23 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of AutoMOTIVE 5

Editors Note
News
Here For The Long Haul
Halewood. Rebirth of a Car Plant
Safety First
Focus on Flexibility
A Prophet Without Honour?
Chrysler Cuts It Four Ways
A MINI For All Reasons
Porsche Plans Continuous Logistics Improvement
Flawless, Consistent Execution
Ford's European Supplier Parks Deliver Lean Manufacturing Efficiencies
Cheap and Cheerful
Onwards and Upwards
Schrader and Siemens Electronics Assembly Systems Take the Pressure
No Faults Forward
A Long Way From Wheelbarrows and Bath Tubs
A New Era in US/Japanese Cooperation
A Dialogue of the Deaf

AutoMOTIVE 5

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