Prior to the industrial age, the world was essentially an agrarian and a trading economy. Production methods were often a craft and top secret, fiercely protected within a family and handed down from a master craftsman to his sons, and with no machinery for mass production, pretty much every product was handmade and unique, perhaps also customized, for its intended user. Industrial revolution made mass production and rapid movement of goods possible, and among other things, catapulted Britain into forefront of global economies. Gutenburg’s printing press was perhaps the first mass production system built by man. Subsequent inventions like harnessing of steam power made railways possible, spinning machines, and other advances in iron founding and chemicals pushed the envelope. However, a lot of these advances were limited to Europe and even more within the UK, which thrived on these advances and became the economic (and imperial) superpower well until the start of twentieth century.
However, by the start of twentieth century, America too woke up to industrial advancements and contributed to some of the most important advancements that still continue to touch our lives. The pioneering work by Eli Whitney on ‘interchangeable parts’ on his now classic cotton gin introduced the concept of modular design, followed up by Frederick Winslow Taylor’s groundbreaking work on scientific management led to the concepts of standard work and division of labor (even if somewhat questionable and controversial in today’s context) and created the foundation for Henry Ford to envisage a mass production system with a moving assembly line where finished goods could be assembled from standard parts by semi-trained operators, e.g. Ford’s most famous Model T car in black color (“Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”).
In essense, a production run, say in an automative parts production or even a car assembly line, is the repetition of a process that produces similar (or similar-looking) objects. Once the ‘process’ is ‘designed’, the job entails repeating the process till the desired number of objects have been produced. Clearly, the faster you produce those objects, the sooner you can put them up in the market for sale and start getting money. The more you produce, the more you are able to amortize the capex, and get lower per unit price over the long run. Intuitively, if you have to produce objects that are exactly alike in properties, shape, size, color or any other physical attributes achieved by the production process, you can ensure that your production machinery will need to be ‘programmed’ once and re-used several times later. So, if you run the paint shop (which seems to be the largest bottleneck in terms of time in a modern production setup) and need to produce purple colored chasis, once you set the process, stock the paint to desired levels, you are pretty much all set. Now imagine if you have to produce first 200 cars in purple, then next 30 in wine red, then next 70 in pearl white colors. Surely there needs to be some way (manual or otherwise) to alter the production process to suit such job order. Similarly, instead of producting 300 sedans, if you have to produce a mix of automobiles – say, 50 SUVs, 50 compacts, 150 sedans and 50 hybrids, your process will have to be different from the one that just produces 300 sedans in a single production run. While the customer desires options (don’t we all?), the manufacturer incurs additional time, money and resources in creating such options. From the manufacturer’s point of view, producing each piece exactly similar as the last one makes such great economic sense that he can create huge economies of scale made possible by principles of mass production. It simplifies the machine (and machine operations) required in plants, it standardizes the components required, there is no downtime to alter the production process, people don’t have to be retrained every now and then on different type of products, and all this make the entire production process very ‘controllable’ from throughput and quality perspective, and hence highly predictable. Elaborate statistical charts can be created based on prior experience on how much time it takes for a given production run, how much men (and women) and materials are needed to meet a given production target, and what levels of quality can be achieved based on statistical experiences.
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