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Henry Ford Discusses
Manufacturing and Marketing
1922 In 1909 I announced one morning,
without any previous warning, that in the future we were going to build only
one model, that the model was going to be "Model T," and that the
chassis would be exactly the same for all cars, and I remarked: "Any customer can have a car
painted any colour that he wants so long as it is
black." I cannot say that any one agreed with
me. . . . A motor car was still regarded as something in the way of a luxury.
The manufacturers did a good deal to spread this idea. Some clever persons
invented the name "pleasure car" and the advertising emphasized the
pleasure features. The sales people had ground for their objection and
particularly when I made the following announcement: "I will build a motor car for the
great multitude. It will be large enough for the family but small enough for
the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best
materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that
modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man
making a good salary will be unable to own one--and enjoy with his family the
blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces. . . ." The more economical methods of
production did not begin all at once. They began gradually--just as we began
gradually to make our own parts. "Model T" was the first motor that
we made ourselves. The great economies began in assembling and then extended
to other sections so that, while to-day we have skilled mechanics in plenty, they
do not produce automobiles--they make it easy for others to produce them. Our
skilled men are the tool makers, the experimental workmen, the machinists,
and the pattern makers. They are as good as any men in the world--so good,
indeed, that they should not be wasted in doing that which the machines they
contrive can do better. The rank and file of men come
to us unskilled; they learn their jobs within a few hours or a few days. If
they do not learn within that time they will never be of any use to us. These
men are, many of them, foreigners, and all that is required before they are
taken on is that they should be potentially able to do enough work to pay the
overhead charges on the floor space they occupy. They do not have to be
able-bodied men. We have jobs that require great physical strength--although
they are rapidly lessening; we have other jobs that require no strength
whatsoever--jobs which, as far as strength is concerned, might be attended to
by a child of three. . . . A Ford car contains about five thousand
parts--that is counting screws, nuts, and all. Some of the parts are fairly
bulky and others are almost the size of watch parts. In our first assembling
we simply started to put a car together at a spot on the floor and workmen
brought to it the parts as they were needed in exactly the same way that one
builds a house. When we started to make parts it was natural to create a
single department of the factory to make that part, but usually one workman
performed all of the operations necessary on a small part. The rapid press of
production made it necessary to devise plans of production that would avoid
having the workers falling over one another. The undirected worker spends
more of his time walking about for materials and tools than he does in working;
he gets small pay because pedestrianism is not a highly paid line. The first step forward in assembly came
when we began taking the work to the men instead of the men to the work. We
now have two general principles in all operations--that a man shall never
have to take more than one step, if possibly it can be avoided, and that no
man need ever stoop over. The principles of assembly are these: 1. Place the tools and the men in the
sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least
possible distance while in the process of finishing. 2. Use work slides or some other form
of carrier so that when a workman completes his operation, he drops the part
always in the same place--which place must always be the most convenient
place to his hand--and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next
workman for his operation. 3. Use sliding assembling lines by
which the parts to be assembled are delivered at convenient distances. The net result of the application of
these principles is the reduction of the necessity for thought on the part of
the worker and the reduction of his movements to a minimum. He does as nearly
as possible only one thing with only one movement. The assembling of the chassis is, from
the point of view of the nonmechanical mind, our
most interesting and perhaps best known operation, and at one time it was an
exceedingly important operation. We now [1922] ship out the parts for
assembly at the point of distribution. Along about I believe that this was the first
moving line ever installed. The idea came in a general way from the overhead
trolley that the About the best we had done in
stationary chassis assembly was an average of twelve hours and twenty-eight
minutes per chassis. We tried the experiment of drawing the chassis with a
rope and windlass down a line two hundred fifty feet long. Six assemblers travelled with the chassis and picked up the parts from
piles placed along the line. This rough experiment reduced the time to five
hours fifty minutes per chassis. In the early part of 1914 we elevated the
assembly line. We had adopted the policy of "man-high" work; we had
one line twenty-six and three quarter inches and another twenty-four and one
half inches from the floor--to suit squads of different heights. The
waist-high arrangement and a further subdivision of work so that each man had
fewer movements cut down the labour time per
chassis to one hour thirty-three minutes. Only the chassis was then assembled
in the line. The body was placed on in " It must not be imagined, however, that
all this worked out as quickly as it sounds. The speed of the moving work had
to be carefully tried out; in the fly-wheel magneto we first had a speed of
sixty inches per minute. That was too fast. Then we tried eighteen inches per
minute. That was too slow. Finally we settled on forty-four inches per
minute. The idea is that a man must not be hurried in his work--he must have
every second necessary but not a single unnecessary second. We have worked
out speeds for each assembly, for the success of the chassis assembly caused
us gradually to overhaul our entire method of manufacturing and to put all
assembling in mechanically driven lines. The chassis assembling line, for
instance, goes at a pace of six feet per minute; the front axle assembly line
goes at one hundred eighty-nine inches per minute. In the chassis assembling
are forty-five separate operations or stations. The first men fasten four
mudguard brackets in the chassis frame; the motor arrives on the tenth
operation and so on in detail. Some men do only one or two small operations,
others do more. The man who places a part does not fasten it--the part may
not be fully in place until after several operations later. The man who puts
in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not
tighten it. On operation number thirty-four the budding motor gets its
gasoline; it has previously received lubrication; on operation number
forty-four the radiator is filled with water, and on operation number
forty-five the car drives out onto John R. Street. . . . Our policy is to reduce the price,
extend the operations, and improve the article. You will notice that the
reduction of price comes first. We have never considered any costs as fixed.
Therefore we first reduce the price to a point where we believe more sales
will result. Then we go ahead and try to make the price. We do not bother
about the costs. The new price forces the costs down. . . . The payment of high wages fortunately
contributes to the low costs because the men become steadily more efficient
on account of being relieved of outside worries. The payment of five dollars
a day for an eight-hour day was one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever
made, and the six-dollar day wage is cheaper than the five. How far this will
go, we do not know. We have always made a profit at the
prices we have fixed and, just as we have no idea how high wages will go, we
also have no idea how low prices will go, but there is no particular use in
bothering on that point. The tractor, for instance, was first sold for $750,
then at $850, then at $625, and the other day we cut it 37 per cent to $395.
. . . The standardization that effects large economies for the consumer results in
profits of such gross magnitude to the producer that he can scarcely know
what to do with his money. But his effort must be sincere, painstaking, and
fearless. Cutting out a half-a-dozen models is not standardizing. It may be,
and usually is, only the limiting of business, for
if one is selling on the ordinary basis of profit--that is, on the basis of
taking as much money away from the consumer as he will give up--then surely
the consumer ought to have a wide range of choice. Standardization, then, is the final
stage of the process. We start with [the] consumer, work back through the
design, and finally arrive at manufacturing. The manufacturing becomes a
means to the end of service. It is important to bear this order in
mind. As yet, the order is not thoroughly understood. The price relation is
not understood. The notion persists that prices ought to be kept up. On the
contrary, good business--large consumption--depends on their going down. And here is another point. The service
must be the best you can give. It is considered good manufacturing practice,
and not bad ethics, occasionally to change designs so that old models will
become obsolete and new ones will have to be bought either because repair
parts for the old cannot be had, or because the new model offers a new sales
argument which can be used to persuade a consumer to scrap what he has and
buy something new. We have been told that this is good business, that it is
clever business, that the object of business ought to be to get people to buy
frequently and that it is bad business to try to make anything that will last
forever, because once a man is sold he will not buy again. Our principle of business is precisely
to the contrary. We cannot conceive how to serve the consumer unless we make
for him something that, as far as we can provide, will last forever. We want
to construct some kind of a machine that will last forever. It does not
please us to have a buyer's car wear out or become obsolete. We want the man
who buys one of our products never to have to buy another. We never make an
improvement that renders any previous model obsolete. The parts of a specific
model are not only interchangeable with all other cars of that model, but
they are interchangeable with similar parts on all the cars that we have
turned out. You can take a car of ten years ago and, buying to-day's parts, make it with very little expense into a car of
to-day. Having these objectives the costs always come down under pressure.
And since we have the firm policy of steady price reduction, there is always
pressure. Sometimes it is just harder! . . . Now as to saturation. We are
continually asked: "When will you get to the point of
overproduction? When will there be more cars than people to use them?" We believe it is possible some day to
reach the point where all goods are produced so cheaply and in such
quantities that overproduction will be a reality. But as far as we are
concerned, we do not look forward to that condition with fear--we look
forward to it with great satisfaction. Nothing could be more splendid than a
world in which everybody has all that he wants. Our fear is that this
condition will be too long postponed. As to our own products, that condition
is very far away. We do not know how many motor cars a family will desire to
use of the particular kind that we make. We know that, as the price has come
down, the farmer, who at first used one car (and it must be remembered that
it is not so very long ago that the farm market for motor cars was absolutely
unknown--the limit of sales was at that time fixed by all the wise
statistical sharps at somewhere near the number of millionaires in the
country) now often uses two, and also he buys a truck. Perhaps, instead of
sending workmen out to scattered jobs in a single car, it will be cheaper to
send each worker out in a car of his own. That is happening with salesmen.
The public finds its own consumptive needs with unerring accuracy, and since
we no longer make motor cars or tractors, but merely the parts which when
assembled become motor cars and tractors, the facilities as now provided
would hardly be sufficient to provide replacements for ten million cars. And
it would be quite the same with any business. We do not have to bother about
overproduction for some years to come, provided the prices are right. It is the
refusal of people to buy on account of price that really stimulates real
business. Then if we want to do business we have to get the prices down
without hurting the quality. Thus price reduction forces us to learn improved
and less wasteful methods of production. One big part of the discovery of
what is "normal" in industry depends on managerial genius
discovering better ways of doing things. If a man reduces his selling price
to a point where he is making no profit or incurring a loss, then he simply is
forced to discover how to make as good an article by a better method--making
his new method produce the profit, and not producing a profit out of reduced
wages or increased prices to the public. . . . Credits: Henry Ford, in collaboration with Samuel
Crowther, My Life and Work (New York: Doubleday and
Company, 1922). |