Quote:
Originally Posted by D13
I actually shut down a plant one night becuse we ran out of a certain brake rotor / pad combo and there were a lot of them on the line.
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Reminds me of an incident we had launching the Volt program.
In the Hamtramck plant the first place the new content would hit would be the IP line, where the dash assembly was built up and the instrument cluster, radio, HVAC controls, etc, would be installed. We would hang out there in order to get an early look at how the options were broadcasting.
One time I was standing there with my plant host, the plant planner, and the line stopped. Naturally I’m a bit sensitive to when it goes down so I cut into our conversation abruptly and asked “why are we down?”
"Uh – we’re on break” he said, looking around nervously.
“Good” I said. “I wanted to make sure it wasn’t my fault”.
HA HA, right?
In about two minutes my host comes running over, all in a huff. “SEYMORE!” he says. “We’re not on break; we're down on the IP line and IT’S YOUR FAULT!”.
A bit surprised at this sudden change of status I sauntered over and there was a crowd of neckties around the radio install. The line superintendent (the foreman's boss) was there and took the opportunity to show boat a bit by ripping me a new one about engineering changes, and how stupid engineers are, and how disruptive temporary changes are, etc. It was in that supportive environment I had to figure out what was going on. It seemed that one of the inspection features had the line shut down, the symptom being that as the operator tried to scan one of the bar codes the reader didn’t recognize it as the right part and stopped the line. After a couple minutes I asked her to show me what she was doing.
“I’m scanning this” she said “but it won’t go.”
That’s when I noticed she was scanning the wrong bar code; Operator error. I showed her the uplevel part number and code and when she hit that with the laser reader “…whirrrrrr” everything spun back to life. The crowd quietly disbursed and everybody went back to whatever they were doing.
I just thought it was funny that it was "wasn’t my fault/was my fault/wasn’t my fault". Never got an apology for being unjustly accused, either...
At any rate, in 40 years, I don't think I have ever intentionally stopped the final line, even when I was a production supervisor. And - it can be pretty lonely at 5 minutes before 6 am when it's just you, your quality man and a couple of your favorite assemblers standing around waiting for the line to start up for the day.
K