The shock about Ford’s Struandale Engine Plant in Gqeberha within the Eastern Cape is that it’s extra like a medical facility than a clanking, hissing, steaming, noisy manufacturing facility.
For a begin, till not too long ago and effectively past the tip of the federal government’s Covid mandates, Ford nonetheless required staff to put on face masks to supply a protected and wholesome work setting, and, because of the impression Covid sick go away can have on manufacturing at a finely-tuned, correct and ‘simply in time” manufacturing course of.
The engine meeting line options constructive air air flow – as you’ll discover in a hospital working theatre, so contamination is minimised.
One germ can compromise, and even kill, a affected person on the desk… and specks of mud can compromise or kill an engine constructed to effective tolerances.
Plant supervisor Shawn Govender says as of late, manufacturing half specs are measured in microns (thousandths of a millimetre).
When he first joined Ford, getting on for 25 years, says Govender, the engines have been quite a bit decrease tech…and the tolerances a lot much less exact.
Engineering specialist Henco Booysen takes up the theme: A human hair is 80 microns (0.08 mm) thick, and the standard checks are so correct {that a} single hair has been recognized to lead to an assembled part failing one of many many leak exams carried out alongside the meeting line.
The hospital analogies don’t finish there… Quality management is consistently and obsessively being carried out on the manufacturing traces.
Even the smallest error will trigger a batch to be redone or scrapped, and when elements are checked and located to be ‘out of spec”, they’re put into ‘quarantine” (as sick sufferers can be) to allow them to be examined and recognized.
Sometimes they are often cured, typically they’ll’t.
Out on the road, each course of is meticulously measured – and recorded, typically by good instruments, that are linked robotically to Ford’s global database.
It is beautiful to grasp that somebody at Ford’s comparable plant in Brazil can name up info from Struandale, whose individuals can, in flip, test on what the plant in Germany is doing.
This, says Govender, is a course of which consistently occurs as the varied vegetation benchmark towards one another, realizing the outcomes shall be scrutinised each regionally and on the automobile maker’s global headquarters.
Ford invested R600 million within the engine plant, on high of the R15.8 billion it put into increasing the car meeting operations at its Silverton plant in Pretoria.
In each circumstances, the investments have been removed from being handouts – Ford SA needed to bid towards others inside the firm’s global community to get the enterprise.
And that, Govender notes with delight, exhibits how good South Africa might be in global competitiveness phrases.
The Struandale facility machines elements and assembles a variety of diesel engines for Ford merchandise round world.
The Silverton plant will get the only and biturbo 2.0-litre motors, which go into the Rang-er and Everest fashions, in addition to the two.2 and three.2 engines.
More than two-thirds of the automobiles assembled at Silverton are destined for the export market – all powered by engines from Struandale.
At the identical time machined elements and assembled engines head out from Struandale internationally.
That’s one of many causes Simoné Joseph, a top quality engineer on the Block Line, needs to be so devoted to her job.
Her line operates two shifts whereas a number of the others run three shifts across the clock. So she’s on name most evenings, able to rush into the plant to kind out points.
She is aware of that her fellow Ford engineers are watching her from world wide.
‘The different day my children have been fairly shocked as a result of I used to be house on the weekends,” she laughs.
Even as she speaks, she factors to a senior auditor from Ford’s regional headquarters in Australia, who arrived on the manufacturing facility at 6.30 am to look at how the early shift does issues.
‘This is a matter of delight for us,” says the Struandale veteran, who began out as an operator on the RoCam engine line in 2004.
‘I don’t need anybody – a car buyer or one other plant – coming again and saying they’d an issue…”
Quality management – and what appears to be infinite checking and double checking by the likes of people like Simoné and quite a few high-tech robots and digicam programs – is the essence of the Struandale method.
It is one thing of a shock as a result of Ford just isn’t typically spoken about like Toyota, which is lauded for its high quality.
As you stroll across the machining and meeting traces, you realise it might be close to not possible for a ‘dud” engine to search out its manner right into a Ranger or an Everest.
The accuracy and a spotlight to element are crucial for the longevity of contemporary com-plex turbodiesel engines – and, in fact, holding guarantee claims to a minimal drives backside line outcomes.
Ultimately, because the Ranger and Everest automobile park” grows in SA and world wide, word-of-mouth will begin to polish the model picture of Ford to the extent the place high quality and reliability won’t be a serious query in a purchase order choice.
And a world-class engine is a serious a part of the notion of high quality.
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