For all those who have never toured or worked in a modern vehicle assembly plant, I highly recommend adding such a tour to your bucket list.
Someone mentioned earlier in this thread something about a right hand emblem installer and a left hand emblem installer, as if that didn't make sense. Trust me, if those emblems are installed on a moving assembly line it makes perfect sense. In the auto plant I most recently worked in, operators had approximately 40 seconds to perform the several tasks they were assigned on each vehicle as it passed by at more than 70 units per hour. For both efficiency and safety, we designed jobs to minimize and preferably eliminate having people cross the actual assembly line to perform their tasks. We also spent the time, money, and effort to create special lines where the vehicles traveled sideways so operators could work on the front and rear without having to backpedal away from or chase the vehicles on the regular lines.
I'm not familiar with Harley's current assembly system, but when these things are designed right it isn't difficult to eliminate or nearly eliminate the wrong part problem. In my plant each vehicle had a transponder encoded with all the build info for that serial number, and those transponders were used to provide correct part information to the workers on displays at their workstations. In cases where there were multiple choices due to color and/or option packages that info could also be shared with an automated 'Pick" system. For instance, nameplates that came in several different model designations as well as finish would be loaded to the workstation in individual slots, and when the vehicle came into the workstation the transponder data was read and the correct emblem would be highlighted, usually by a light indicating the correct slot. This took the onus off the assembly worker who had very little time to read an old fashioned build sheet hanging on the vehicle, translate the code, and determine which part corresponded to the model, series, and trim level info he read off that sheet. Now all you had to do was make sure the person loading the parts to the racks put them in the right slots. This was an offline person who had a lot more time than the person on the assembly line.
I used to be grabbed quite often by the tour leaders in my last plant to explain certain things and answer questions when they came to my department. The biggest takeaway I got from all those people was how amazed they were that anything came out of the plant correctly, considering the tens of thousands of parts involved and the speed at which people had to perform their jobs. The systems still aren't perfect of course, but when management makes the effort to design the jobs properly and to poka-yoke (idiot proof for the old timers) the processes to avoid errors rather than detect them after the fact, things don't have to be screwed up and you don't have to depend on inspections and repairmen at the end of the line to produce an accurately built product.
To sum up my longwinded post, please don't automatically blame such things on the guy or gal on the assembly line. Quite often the real cause of the problem can be traced to management not designing the job properly, or management not assigning trained people to the job (temporary part time workers are big in the MoCo's latest labor cost reduction strategy btw). It's not always a lazy or disgruntled worker. Btw, the idea that management is the biggest problem didn't go over all that well with many of my fellow managers back in the day. It took a whole lot of years and changes in management personnel to get to where we are today.
Jerry
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Topic: I guess they named this model correct-Limited-at least mine (Read 7906 times)