The Fordson tractor was produced in the Fordson tractor plant, from to In , production of the tractor was switched to the Rouge Plant. World War I production created the demand for larger numbers of workers and served as an entry point for Black workers into the industrial economy.
Growing numbers of Southern migrants made their way to Detroit and specifically to Ford Motor Company to meet increased production for military and consumer demands. But some were employed as skilled machinists or factory foremen, or in white-collar positions. Ford paid equal wages for equal work, with Blacks and whites earning the same pay in the same posts. Different manufacturing ideas had already been introduced, such as outsourcing the Olds company came up with this when their factory burned down and using standardised parts that could be interchanged among several models an idea developed by Cadillac.
Remember, this is an allegory, so the words "outsourcing" and "interchange" are important to note. In , Henry Ford introduced the "assembly line" for motor vehicle construction. The first car model to be produced on the production line was the Model T. The assembly or production line replaced the "coachbuilding" method of building cars where cars were built individually, one by one.
Ford's assembly line was what we would now call "transformative process engineering". The assembly line was built on a foundation of standardisation: standard processes to produce simple components in a standardised production system.
To understand how standardisation created such an opportunity for efficiency, we need to know the methods that preceded those of Ford. The terms "standard processes", "simple components", and "standardised production systems" are key to the allegory.
Before the assembly line, motor vehicles were made by artisans. Purchasing a motor vehicle was a two-step process: first you would buy a chassis from a "chassis maker" , and then you would take it to a "coachbuilder".
The chassis maker would supply the chassis, the drive train engine, gears, axles and wheels , the suspension, the radiator, and the steering system. The coachbuilder would build a body for the chassis to suit the customer's needs. If the customer needed four seats, the coachbuilder would build a four-seat cabin. If the customer needed a small truck, the coachbuilder would build a two-seat cabin with a tray on the same chassis.
The chassis maker worked in metal, and the coachbuilder worked in wood and leather. Sometimes, chassis makers and coachbuilders would team up to offer a packaged product. For example, Fisher Body teamed up with Cadillac to build all the closed-body Cadillacs of the s. Even after Henry Ford's assembly line had transformed manufacturing and half of all cars in America were Model Ts, coachbuilding persisted.
In sharp contrast to Ford, Rolls-Royce was very slow to embrace the assembly line. Up until World War II, every Rolls-Royce was produced by artisans in the coachbuilding tradition, as a rolling chassis to be later sent to an independent coachbuilder.
In the s, it became popular for the wealthy to use coachbuilders as a way of creating exclusive and expensive versions of mass-produced assembly line cars, including the humble Mini. Hooper, the Rolls-Royce coachbuilders, created the first luxury Mini in at four times the cost of a standard Mini. The most famous of the Hooper Minis was one owned by Peter Sellers; this car featured a hand-stencilled wicker-work effect body decoration.
A standard Mini Cooper cost pounds; a Radford cost 2, Even today, over a century after the introduction of Ford's assembly line, coachbuilders still exist, but they have become niche companies servicing the wealthy.
Car manufacturers with a reliance on coachbuilding are now all but extinct. Now remember, this is supposed to be an allegory. How is this history of car manufacturing symbolic of the business of technical communication?
I'll get to that shortly The assembly line is a manufacturing process where parts are added to a product in a sequential manner using "division of labour", where one person repeatedly performs only one small portion of the entire process. Practically speaking, this means that one person's job might be to hammer the spokes into the wheels; nothing more, nothing less. The spoke hammerer becomes an expert at spoke hammering, and becomes more and more efficient at that task. If the spokes and the wheels arrive at the spoke hammerer's position at exactly the right time, and this is repeated for all the different tasks in the line, the car can be produced at the lowest unit cost.
One of Henry Ford's famous quotes about the Model T was, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants, so long as it is black. The Model T only came in black because the production line required compromise so that efficiency and improved quality could be achieved. Spraying different colours would have required a break in the production line, meaning increased costs, more staff, more equipment, a more complicated process, and the risk of the wrong colour being applied.
Using the car manufacturing metaphor, we can say that technical communication is still largely in the coachbuilding era, where artisans hand-craft unique document products using all-in-one tools such as FrameMaker, Word, RoboHelp, and Flare. Non-standard products with non-interchangeable components are produced, at a cost that only the wealthy customers and employers can afford. Technical communication as a profession risks going the way of coachbuilders More than that, they did not particularly care.
Fortunately, there is production data for 18 years. Production went from thousands per year in to millions per year. Model T production ended 25 May The The Model A was launched at the end of the Because the Model T chassis that did not change much in 18 years, the designers could devote more effort to the passenger related parameters. He was not detracted by the reports from the salesmen. He monitored development to minimize unvalidated additions to the product backlog which is also known as product feature creep.
Feature Creep : The tendency for designers or engineers to add more capability, functions and features to a product as development proceeds than were originally intended. These additions frequently cause schedule slip, development cost increases, and product cost increases. Or to be precise, the first affordable horseless carriage.
Henry Ford aimed to make a car "large enough for the family but small enough for the individual to run and care for. The production of the Ford Model T ended on May 25th, ; a span of almost 18 years. The fifteen millionth milestone Ford Model T was green in colour. So what about the notion that Ford Model T cars came only in black? During the early stages of the Model T production, the car was available in almost any colour, except black. In fact the very first model came in red. Later models of the Ford Model T came with a variety of colours such as green, bright red, dark blue, maroon, brown, grey and of course black.
But from to , the Model T came only in black. This time period also saw a high demand for the Ford Model T and Ford Motor company had to meet the increased demand with enough supply. There are many theories to why Henry Ford chose only black back then. Ford Model T models were painted using a technique called japanning known today as baked enamel.
The coating was used for decorative items in the s. Japanning gave a piano black finish and was also proved to be durable and hard.
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