04.01.08

I just returned from a wonderful Spring Break vacation with my family, spent camping in our recently acquired pop-up trailer in the cave region of Kentucky. Mammoth Cave National Park happens to be very close to Bowling Green, so we took the opportunity to visit the National Corvette Museum, and tour GM’s Bowling Green Assembly Plant, the only factory on earth that produces the legendary Corvette…

I have had the opportunity to work with various companies in the auto industry (including GM), but I have never been to a major assembly plant before, and it was a treat. What was especially impressive is that in modern plants like Bowling Green, every car is built to order, despite the appearance of “mass production”. The plant builds both Corvettes and Cadillac XLRs, but the Corvette line fascinated me because the “outside” of the car is assembled (painted, welded, put together) separately from the “inside” (axles, tires, transmission, engine, etc). At one point in the process, the bodies descend from the ceiling and are attached to the drive train. The amazing thing is that most of the components are specific to each car — so the entire assembly operation must be kept in synch.

What impressed me was how little inventory was visible, with mobile racks of kitted parts moving around the plant. Reading the labels that happened to cross in front of me I saw no two kits coming from the same source (mostly GM plants in the midwest, though some tier one suppliers were also in evidence). With not an RFID tag in sight, I saw barcodes aplenty (one dimensional in this case), clearly linked up to a powerful production control system.

I think most of the people on the tour with me were impressed by the plant, it was hard not to be. But I doubt very many were able to appreciate that Bowling Green is so on top of its supply chain parts flow that they can start a car even though many of the kits to produce it are not even at the downstream stations yet. Since every car is built to order, parts from all over the US and some from Mexico must arrive at the station in time to be assembled — and the entire line will have to stop if anything is missing (it didn’t stop in the three plus hours I was there).

I have worked in B2B for a long time, but I still really enjoy seeing what is possible when trading partners can move at the speed of information. It was a beautiful sight…and the cars were nice too.