this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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I don't know how Ford does things, but if your process is well documented and controlled new workers can produce just as good a quality. The biggest problem should be just how slow. I can put new wipers on a car - or whatever it is each person is doing, but someone with experience can do things much faster.
And if you rush them, then things go wrong in a hurry. It doesn't matter how much documentation you have if the operator skips steps or plain old makes a mistake.
I've personally blown up thousands of dollars in tooling making stupid mistakes when I was a junior machinist being told we had deadlines to meet. I've seen other guys forget to probe a work offset and crash the machine so badly it needs a spindle rebuild. A press operator can wreck a $100,000 die set if they make even relatively easy mistakes, and if that happens to the wrong tool, it can completely shut down production for months for a repair or rebuild.
If there's a 1 in a million chance that any of those 10,000 employees makes a big, showstopping mistake on a given day, then after 100 days, there's a 63% chance of that event happening.
Correct, but not that the union people all has to learn things at some point. Ford has to train several hundred new people every year anyway.
"Several hundred" is two orders of magnitude less than 10,000.