From most accounts, the re-launch of Ford's F-150 pickup truck was a major undertaking. Some called it a new start. Others said it was a 'bet the company' move.

Whatever it's been called, the truck is a huge hit. Motor Trend magazine named it the 2004 Truck of the Year. Meanwhile, production from the two plants that produce the pickup is sold out as a third plant is being readied for startup later this year.

Working behind the scenes of this success story is the Dearborn Stamping Plant. There, more than 8,000 doors are produced daily for the F-150. And that's just the beginning. Roughly 12,000 doors a day are slated to be produced when the company starts up its new Dearborn assembly plant next door by late summer.

'When we hit our stride, we will have to operate with 88% uptime, six days a week, three shifts a day. No stamping plant in the world works at this level,' says Frank Piazza, plant manager.

As Roger Damm, material planning and logistics, stamping business unit staff engineer, explains, 'we could not hit these numbers unless our materials handling equipment was reliable and efficient.' The centerpiece of materials handling is a fleet of automatic guided vehicles (FMC Technologies) that manage the flow of sheet steel and work-in-process. The two different types of vehicles used—unit load and tugger—travel a total distance of 11/8 miles in the plant.

But it's not just a matter of moving steel across this vast plant with 1.6 million square feet dedicated to door production. The facility is also on two floors. That required a highly efficient vertical conveyance system to move stamped door panels between floors.

As Glen McNaughton, senior material handling engineer, says, 'the system uses fairly simple techniques to make things move up and down and forward and back. This isn't a complicated system. But it is flexible. And we need that to support production.'

In fact, the stamping operation is in the River Rouge plant, an historic facility for Ford that originally opened in 1936. Prior to F-150 door production, a portion of the upper level of the plant was unused and the first level produced parts for the Cougar and Contour Mystique.

As Piazza explains, the building was gutted to bring in door production. The original plan was to give Dearborn only some of the F-150 door work, but that changed. Essentially, sufficient space was opened up in the plant through efficient materials handling that there was no need to split door production with another facility.

'Since no other stamping plants are on two floors, we essentially took a disadvantage and turned it into an advantage. The union was our partner in reconfiguring this facility, and our partnership is what made this the success it is today. Safety was given the highest priority and we're seeing a big payoff,' explains Piazza.

McNaughton explains that the result is essentially a greenfield facility in an existing building. As the diagram in this story explains, sheet steel is received at one end of the facility and staged there. Between 15 and 20 truck loads of steel arrive daily.

A fleet of five unit load automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) pickup steel blanks at a load stand in the receiving area. As much as 30,000 pounds of steel are carried by an AGV, which is laser guided, about a half mile to a concrete ramp leading to the second floor. Once there, blanks are unloaded at another stand for transfer by lift truck to the nearby press for stamping into door panels.

The AGVs will never be a constraint to the press,' says Piazza. 'Production rules.'

Stamped parts are fed by belt conveyor to a three-lane loading area. There, workers manually load each panel into a mobile rack, which is released to the vertical conveyance system. The system consists of three vertical lanes that operate independently of each other to deliver racks of parts to the first floor. The conveyance system can stage up to eight racks at a time or about 11/2 hours of parts.

Tugger AGVs pulling three trailers each takeaway the racks of door panels. Racks are loaded automatically onto the vehicles. According to McNaughton, the path followed by those eight tuggers, also laser guided, opened up previously unused space totaling 37,000 square feet.

Most importantly, that newly claimed space made it possible to use AGVs to move racks of panels to the work-in-process (WIP) area. Otherwise, the AGVs would not have been able to maneuver their loads from the vertical conveyance systems to the WIP area, requiring another, less efficient handling solution, according to McNaughton. Movement of racks in the WIP area is by lift truck prior to shipment to one of the plants for assembly on trucks.

Since startup of the system a little over a year ago, the paths that the AGVs follow have been altered many times, explains McNaughton. 'In fact, we've found ways to shorten the original path by 20%, which has not only saved time but freed up vehicles for use elsewhere. This will be particularly important as we increase production when the new assembly plant comes on line,'

When that adjacent facility is in full gear, finished door assemblies will be hung on truck assemblies less than five hours after being released from the stamping plant. 'We really do have to be flexible to support production of the F-150 both now and in the future,' says McNaughton.