When faced with the need to manufacture vehicles quickly and inexpensively in a nation where the horse and buggy were the way of life Henry Ford choose to use conveyor system manufacturing and changed the course of automobile manufacturing forever. The system allowed heavy parts to be transported without injury to workers. These systems allow machinery to do work that people often find difficult.
By the’50s conveyor systems had moved their way to the food manufacturing business as evidenced when Lucy and Ethel went to work in the chocolate factory packaging chocolates.
A favorite example of a conveyor system that saves its owners money and improves the safety for workers is found in the donut chain. This system extrudes donuts from the dough and drops them into the fat to fry. The flow down the little fat river and are flipped at precisely the correct time. They continue to move on down that little river and are picked up by a metal conveyor belt when the cooking is done. This metal conveyor causes them to pass through a blanket of frosting and moves them on down the line to be packaged by the worker.
The system addresses three problems. Without the system, there would need to be a person at several stations along the line. The person shaping the donuts, the person dropping the donuts into the fat, a person to flip the donuts, another to lift them out of the fat, someone to frost the donuts and then the person to package them would all be required. Instead it only takes the one person to package those donuts.
Conveyor systems are used in many other ways in the food industry. They can be used in preparing and packaging foods or in moving foods through ovens in order to cook the food to perfection. Drink manufacturers use the machines for bottling the drinks. Snack food manufacturers use them to cook and package foods.
With heavier industries, like the automobile industry, heavy parts are easily transported with safety from station to station. Without the system moving these parts could require several workers and more expensive machinery. There is also the possibility of injury to workers along the way. The system can move parts through processes where the temperatures or chemicals used could cause injury to the worker.
As land becomes more expensive and companies build up instead of out, conveyor systems can be used to move parts from one level to another. Moving the part by elevator and with human moving could take half an hour and the conveyor can do the work in seconds.
Conveyor manufacturing systems are much safer than using forklifts or almost any other method of moving parts from one place to another.
If you want to increase productivity and safety, why not do what Ford did almost one hundred years ago. He installed a conveyor system to improve the process of manufacturing the Model T and thus he changed the auto industry forever. This system saved him money and allowed for mass production of the car that changed the way that America traveled.
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