Back in Detroit Henry Ford wondered how he could bring the price of the Model T down to where everybody could buy it. He figured that the more cars you name so the cheaper he could sell each one and he went to work on this idea. In those days each car was built from the frame up on stationary wouldn't horses. There was a different crew for each car and the same crews stayed on the car until it was finished. That meant duplication of effort and a lot of time wasted. They tried moving the men from car to car.
Each man had a special job to do and as soon as he finished it he moved on to the next car did the same thing there was better but it still took 12 and a half hours to assemble each Model T. Henry Ford watched it for While and he had an inspiration. Instead of moving the men past the car, why not move the cars past the man. On one Hot August morning they tried it that way. Husky young fella put a rope over his shoulder and Henry Ford calls Let's go. And have that very moment as the wingman began to fasten the path onto the slowly moving car, the assembly line was born, a technique that would revolutionize mass production all over the world. Once they found that the idea would work, they began to improve it, refine it, they roll the chassis down a single line of track Pushing it from crew to crew.
And the more expert they became at this new method, the faster the cost came off the assembly line, the price of the Model T began to drop. They tried the same idea in all the various parts of the car and created what are called sub assemblies. Each man on the line became a specialist. He did one thing and he did it perfectly, and pass the work along to the next man. minutes five minutes minute production was winning the battle against waste of time and wasted efforts. pots were fed to the workman by gravity slides so they wouldn't have to stop and wait for new pots.
Then they put the past on moving conveyor belt. This was a great step forward because now they could regulate the flow. Keep it moving at a constant rate of speed. And the conveyor belts do longer and more complex as they move the work from place to place in the huge shops. They became fantastic masterpieces of planning and engineering. But the battle against wasted time and wasted effort was being won.
The cars began coming off the assembly line at the rate of one every 40 seconds. And what Henry Ford is boasting happened? mass production on the assembly line drove the price of a Model T down from 850 to $300. Now everybody could have one So as you see Henry Ford wanted to make his cars more affordable, he was only able to sell these cars for $850 to a certain amount of people. So he was able to implement a process and scale it to millions of people to purchase the cars at $300. So he was able to make more money, sell more cars, make more jobs for more people.
And that's what you want to do for your company as well.