Toyota is completely overhauling the Georgetown factory’s assembly lines to be able to build 11 vehicles of all sizes and shapes and pivot among them quickly as customer preferences shift, Antis says. The Japanese company has invested $1.3 billion and spent a year gut-rehabbing the plant, department by department, on weekends and holidays, to install new technology and operating methods on almost every job. For the first time since the Camry’s introduction 35 years ago, Toyota redesigned the car from the ground up, with 100 percent new parts.
Antis has spent much of the past four years looking for ways to reduce the complexity at Georgetown, which has 8,200 permanent and 1,500 temporary workers. In an area where workers prepare engines for final assembly by installing oil filters and other small components, for example, the engines have arrived at the main assembly line via overhead conveyors since the factory opened in 1988. But conveyors are inflexible, Antis says, carrying too many engines when Toyota wants to slow production during recessions and too few when sales are booming. So he’s had the overhead conveyors ripped out over the past year. Engines now arrive on robot-controlled pedestals that follow the path of electronic sensors buried in the floor. If Toyota needs more or fewer engines as sales ebb and flow, workers change the number of pedestals and reroute the sensors.
Adding to the process’s efficiency, the top of each pedestal comes with fixtures that resemble basketball hoops that can be flipped back and forth to hold each size of engine the plant makes. This allows the company to vary the flow engine-by-engine if, for example, buyers shift from conventional gasoline engines to hybrids and back again.
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