ELP

Yesterday, I had a supplier meeting at Honda East Liberty Plant in Ohio. One of the engineers gave Egawa-san and I a plant tour after the meeting. ELP is Honda’s assembly plant for Civic and Element. It’s rather impressive how various components go in to the facility from one end and come out as a complete car from the other end. I’ve never visited an assembly plant, and I was fascinated!

Humongous arm like robots were holding car frames and welding them together in their weld shop. The process is 99% automated. There was something really amusing in a way these massive chunk of metal and wires move so gracefully and with precision. The monster arms are probably about 12 feet tall, and there are about a dozen of them in line. They pass car frames down from one to the next, more than 10 feet up in the air in a fluid motion. There is almost a musical rhythm to the flow. It reminded me of watching a flying trapeze or something.

My favorite part of the tour was the actual assembly line for each component. From what I read in my classes about the history of modern manufacturing, I had a fairly negative image of the assembly line production; that it is repetitive, insulting to the intelligence of the worker, and it produces a large number of disposable unskilled labors. I think the books were referring particularly about the early assembly line production developed by Henry Ford. You know those old pictures of an assembly line where workers line up in front of a conveyor? That is really degrading, I think. Standing in the same spot all day, being pushed to produce more and more by lifeless components coming from upstream one after another. Although I love the mural for its energy, Diego Rivera’s painting of the Ford plant in the DIA also added to my distaste for assembly line production.

In any case what I saw at ELP didn’t give me the impression of people mindlessly slaving away. At least it didn’t look like people were treated merely as a part of larger mechanism to churn out the product. The workers were working in teams, talking to each other, walking around, and many of them were smiling.

Another thing is that their facility is very clean and extremely well organized. Honda workers all ware white uniforms. It shows their commitment for a neat workplace, because when something gets dirty, it will show up very quickly on whites and calls somebody’s attention to clean it up. SO unlike me (I never buy white clothes for the very reason), but it’s cool.

They also have these completely automated carts that go around in the plant and drop off parts at set locations. It’s totally the application of AI. Apparently they are the state of the art, best and newest version available for the industry (thus costing whopping $150,000/cart or so. I saw about a couple dozens of them. It made me wonder how much money Honda has made off the exploitation of us suppliers.) We were told, though, at this point it’s still cheaper to hire somebody to drive a cart than to buy that thing. Hmmm. There are technology worshippers in every organization.

By the way, new civic looks pretty sweet. I really liked the new color selection they had. The interior is much nicer than the one I have, too. And naturally, more expensive.