Chapter 7 - 9

09 Business

Listen to a lecture in a business class. Fill in the diagram with the information that you hear.

M: Hi everyone. I’m sure you all know what mass production is, and even if you don’t, it’s most definitely a part of your daily life.

How, you ask? Well, just to set the record straight, mass production is when large amounts of identical products are made on assembly lines.

So the machine spits out the standard parts and then people put them all together while the parts move down a moving conveyor belt.

Most people think that mass production was invented by Henry Ford, who used it to make the famous Ford Model T car, but the truth is that Ford really just popularized it.

We’re still not sure exactly who invented mass production, but semblance of the production method were seen as early as the American Civil War, when it was used to manufacture firearms.

The idea of the assembly line was first patented in 1901 by Ransom Olds of another automobile company, Olds motor Vehicle Company.

Yet, it wasn’t through any relation to Olds that the Ford Motor Company began to use the assembly line. Instead, according to popular accounts anyway, officials from Ford got the idea from a Chicago slaughterhouse.

The official, Mike Campion, observed the employees at the slaughterhouse butcher portions of animals as they move down a conveyor belt.

Impressed at how fast the employees were able to work by performing a single function over and over again, Campion returned to the company and suggested they apply the “disassembly line” method to their production.

After some initial doubts, the method was finally employed, revolutionizing manufacturing thereafter.

Interestingly, as a way to honor the inspiration for the assembly line, the owner of the slaughterhouse, Pa Klann, was allowed to drive the very first automobile built on assembly line.

So now that you guys have a more accurate history of mass production, I want to discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of the system. The most obvious advantage is that mass production is really fast.

According to the archives at the Henry Ford Museum, after the system was started, they were able to make cars in three minutes. If that doesn’t convince you of the efficiency of mass production, let me add that before it took one hour and 35 minutes to make one car.

There are a couple of reasons why it’s so much faster. Since the parts are all made by machine to a specific, standard size, people don’t waste time refitting parts.

Plus, the simplification of the employee’s tasks made it a lot faster for them to perform their duties, although it made work less interesting.

Another advantage of the system is that human error is significantly reduced, if not completely eliminated.

I sort of alluded to the reason for this before, but I’ll elaborate. Remember that, before, all the parts were made by hand.

But one of the hallmarks of mass productions is having a machine that makes the parts for you. That way, the machine just pumps out many of the same exact part and all the human really needs to watch for is that the machine is functioning correctly.

Are we all still on the same page? Good.

All right, those were some of the advantages, but don’t be fooled. There are some disadvantages as well.

The first example relates back to my point about how mass production eliminates human error.

See, the other side of that is that production design becomes kind of inflexible because you have all these machines making the same parts over and over.

What I mean is that if at any point, you wanted to change the design, you couldn’t just give an employee new specifications.

You’d have to get completely new equipment to make the part for you. That leads me to another disadvantage.

We talked about how efficient the system is, meaning that, in the end, the cost per object is less because it takes less labor, but getting the appropriate machinery to make all the parts is extremely expensive.

Now imagine you’re a business owner. Unless you know for a fact that this machine and system are going to provide a design that you need to ultimately be successful, it would take a lot to convince you that it was even worth making the initial investment in the machinery.

1) What can be inferred about the role of mass production in modern life?

2) What does the professor imply when he says this: but the truth is that Ford really just popularized it.

3) What does the professor imply about working on an assembly line?