THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, March 13, 1995 TAG: 9503120232
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER
STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 144 lines
January 1980: Ford Motor Co.'s sales have dropped by 30 percent. The 2,300 hourly workers at Ford's light truck assembly plant in Norfolk have just returned from a two-week furlough, and the company plans to temporarily idle 21,000 workers at other plants.
With the worst recession in half a century bearing down on the nation, Light truck sales aren't doing well. Norfolk Assembly Plant workers fear Ford may close the plant permanently. Three months later Ford spares the Norfolk plant, but leaves evidence of the devastation of a factory closing: 3,732 workers lose their jobs when Ford closes its gates in Mahwah, N.J.
``We really thought Norfolk would get it because of the drop in truck sales,'' says a union official at the New Jersey plant. ``I'm glad for the people there.''
The company spared its then-55-year-old Norfolk plant, officials said, because of high productivity and quality marks. Workers in Norfolk learned a lesson: When Ford goes looking for places to reduce its capacity, the efficient plants will be spared - regardless of the plant's age.
Fifteen years later, the Norfolk Assembly Plant couldn't be in better shape. The company has pumped more than $500 million into the plant during the past three years. One industry expert rates the Norfolk plant the third most efficient truck plant in North America - including those run by foreign car manufacturers.
Most important, the Norfolk plant's efficiency has earned it an important prize: It will be the lead plant in rolling out the PN96, the company's code name for its redesigned F-series pickup.
How did a plant built in 1925, set up by Henry Ford on the bank of the Elizabeth River, come to be put in charge of launching the redesign of one of Ford's best-selling vehicles?
The answer comes in two often-repeated themes in the corporate world: quality and efficiency. Those concepts are easy to talk up, yet difficult to carry out.
But the Norfolk Assembly Plant is succeeding. The plant's labor productivity rating - the number of workers divided by the number of vehicles built each day - of 2.7 is third best in the country among truck plants.
Only a Nissan Motors plant (2.2) in Smyrna, Tenn., and a joint venture of General Motors and Toyota (2.52) in California have better ratings, according to a report by automobile consultants Harbour and Associates.
Among its peers, the Norfolk Assembly Plant has the best overall quality rating of the five plants that assemble F-series pickups.
Pressure to improve that rating will be even greater in building the PN96.
``It used to be everything hubbed in Detroit, but we've been number one so long now we're taking the lead,'' says Ed Riddick, a troubleshooter at the plant. ``It's going to be our job to catch the problem.''
Riddick and fellow layout inspector Stanley Wilson monitor parts coming from suppliers with a coordinate measuring machine. They match the assembled pickups against the engineers' original drawing, and they're not satisfied with a deviation greater than one hundredth of a millimeter.
``Used to be, your dad bought a Ford, so you'd just go buy a Ford,'' Riddick said. ``People know what they're looking at when they go on a car lot these days. You see these ballbearing commercials on TV? We're trying to achieve that quality.''
With the launch of the PN96 this fall, quality and efficiency at the Norfolk plant will take on added importance. If the Norfolk plant fails to catch a production flaw, it could be passed along to F-series plants in Kentucky, Michigan, Kansas City and Ontario.
And bugs in the early models could be damaging. Ford sold 646,039 F-series pickups in 1994, its highest volume in 15 years. The F-series truck is has been the best-selling vehicle in the United States 13 years running and the best selling truck 18 years in a row.
The PN96 redesign, among other things, will mean one gas tank instead of two for Ford's new pickup, a more rounded, aerodynamic shape, and a suspension system that will give the truck a more car-like ride.
Ford is spending $290 million building a new body shop to launch the PN96, but the technology alone - including another 200 robots - won't necessarily translate to efficiency. But it can help.
``We'll have a couple million dollars worth of cameras looking at the truck as we build it,'' says Jeff Wood, final area manager at the plant. ``We don't have to build four or five then go back and take a look.''
Plant workers, many of whom have been there for two decades or more, helped design the tooling. After years of building pickups, they know how the process should work best.
Ron Harbour, of Harbour and Associates, says there's another reason for the in-house work: the fewer outside contractors the company uses, the smaller the chance of its design secrets getting out.
``The F-series truck is the jewel at Ford,'' Harbour says, ``and the last thing they want to do is tip their hand to anybody on the outside as to what they're doing. There's reason to avoid that situation when it's your bread-and-butter vehicle.''
In 1992, when the F-series pickup underwent its last redesign, Norfolk plant workers boasted that they re-tooled without help from outside contractors. They installed fixtures, built hoists, re-aligned machinery.
``There's the weather-strip fixture,'' Wood says during a tour of the plant. ``It's probably the last machine we bought from the contractor.''
They've now set up a PN96 frame in the middle of the factory to train workers on the new model - even though they likely won't begin building the new full-sized pickups until the end of the year.
Though controlled from Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Mich., the Norfolk plant's consistent quality gives the company reason to trust Norfolk workers' suggestions.
A good example is the thick layer of clearcoat Ford now puts on its pickups after painting them. The non-pigmented coating prevents paint from wiping off when a person waxes the pickup, and gives the truck an extra layer of protection from pebbles kicked up during highway driving.
``We had to pitch to the company that it was worth the additional cost to do it,'' said Lindsay Benson, paint area manager. ``In fact, when we first started doing it the plant paid for it because we thought it was the right thing to do.'' MEMO: [For a related story, see page 13 of Business Weekly for this date.]
ILLUSTRATION: [Cover]
[Color Photo]
MOVE OVER DETROIT
[Color Photo]
RICHARD L. DUNSTON/Staff photos
A state-of-the-art paint shop was completed in the summer of 1993 at
a cost of $180 million.
ABOVE: Paintshop workers are encourage not to wear fragrances and
have to wear hair nets and walk through a static-eliminating booth
before beginning work. Certain kind of colognes and deodorants
create the wrong chemical balance with truck paints. These
specialized paints cost between $60 - $130 per gallon.
LEFT: The plant's 1,900 workers assemble 653 pickups a day. A @290
million expansion will boost capacity to 720 vehicles per day.
Q: How did a plant built in 1925, set up by Henry Ford on the bank
of the Elizabeth River, come to be put in charge of launching the
redesign of one of Ford's best-selling vehicles?
A: Because Norfolk's plant lives by two corporate themes: quality
and efficiency. This is evident in a layer of clearcoat now put on
all pickups. Plant officials felt the coating was an important
quality issue, so much so the plant initially paid for it.
by CNB