“It’s the oldest working car plant in Europe with an output of 1 car every 68 seconds … 1,000 cars per day. Each car takes 24 hours from start to finish.”
Last month, the BBC aired a two-part live show entitled Building Cars Live from the Mini plant in Oxford. It was a fascinating, behind-the-scene look at the process and covered the concepts of no fault forward (i.e. checking the quality of work throughout the process so that defects were avoided as soon as possible, rather than fixing everything at the end) and just in time (including Mini’s Track & Trace system which helps their logistics team manage the flow of parts into the plant), along with a walk through the process, a look at some of the 350 suppliers and other car producers (Toyota and Nissan were mentioned), a splash of history and a look into the future of connected cars (especially automated cars). Oh, and a comparison to the fully hand-built Morgan.
The idea was that over two evenings we would watch our car start production and then, 24 hours later in episode two, we would see the finished product roll off the other end. They even mentioned a special owner who they couldn’t tell us about in part one. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the car we had been tracking throughout the three hours worth of programmes didn’t actually make it through for them to be able to drive it away, and there was no sniff of a celeb owner. I suspect the 4,000 workers at Mini were just relieved that it wasn’t Michael Caine!
But for the geeks out there, the programmes held some good information and at least gave us fodder for calculating WIP in the factory. Can you work out what it is?
Is it:
- 0.35
- 21
- 35
- 1,000
- 1,271
- 58,752
Note: Episode two is still available on iPlayer until 8pm on Thursday 26th November.