COVER STORY NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
Manufacturers
must invest
in the latest
communications
technology, says
Comms365’s
Nick Sacke
MM: As you mention,
technology is playing an
increasingly large role in
manufacturing today. How
have attitudes towards
technology changed since
you first joined Ford, and
have you found it easier
to get staff on board with
implementing it?
WG: It’s very different to 25
years ago, when the robots
were all in cages and the
only people who could touch
them were highly skilled
maintenance technicians.
There was a real fear at the
beginning, because people could
literally see their careers being
ended by these intimidating
machines. As automation has
progressed, we’ve proved that
automation can do the dirty,
heavy, unergonomic work.
Our production lines now also
feature cobots, meaning we
enjoy line-side automation
without cages, doing the drudge
work and upskilling the human
work on the production line.
Many of our operatives are
semi-skilled and able to do
basic maintenance of their
robots, which has meant there
is a lot more acceptance of it.
The automation side of things
has moved on even further to
provide levels of assistance
that we all dreamed of – it’s
now the help, not the enemy.
People on the shopfloor now
realise that automation is there
to make their jobs easier, safer,
more productive and of a higher
quality. So much so that we’re
now looking at using automation
for things like diagnostics – we
use drones to inspect parts of the
plant that would be dangerous
for people to go to.
MM:You have overseen a
lot of change in your career
– what are your secrets to
ensuring change sticks?
WG: For me, if you’re going
to make a change you have
to take everyone with you.
It’s important to be able to
articulate a clear, relatable
vision of what that change will
look like. Call out the benefits
and demonstrate all the ways it
will benefit people – different
government restrictions (such as the 2030 ban on
petrol and diesel cars) and timelines across Europe
in terms of bans on ICE vehicles. In terms of our
manufacturing footprint, we’re migrating from
ICE to electrified products. As part of our reset,
we designed ourselves around reducing costs,
changing our footprint and being agile enough to
respond to market changes.
MM: Nobody could have predicted the
challenges the past 12 months have posed.
How did Ford of Europe manage lockdown
and the ensuing restart of operations?
WG: We went from a normal Friday to a Monday
where all our plants were shut and everyone was
working from home. We did a lot of flexing – we
were part of the Ventilator Consortium, which
really saw the manufacturing team become very
versatile and help turn something that was a
cottage industry, making 40 ventilators a week,
into a full industrialised process making 1500
units a week. Of course, that helped keep the
plant ticking over until we could restart normal
operations. When it came to reopening, we
followed the lead of the Chinese team, who were
a few weeks ahead of the UK and Europe in terms
of restarting post-lockdown. There was a global
Ford playbook that worked out how we were
going to get all our employees back to work safely
and how we had to lay out the factory to comply
with social distancing rules – which, of course,
were different to every country.
We’ve come to the conclusion
that Ford’s manufacturing sites
globally were some of the safest
places to be during the peak of
the pandemic.
We didn’t want to be pulling
on the scarce resources of PPE,
so some of our engineering
teams bought some machinery
from China to make our
own face masks without
drawing on NHS stocks. This
obviously relied on fast, agile
manufacturing processes. Part
of the reason we were able
to pivot so quickly was that
we harnessed some of the
latest technologies, including
virtual reality headsets. Our
engineers in Dagenham worked
with engineers at ventilator
manufacturer Penlon in
Oxfordshire, and never met
in person. Yet, thanks to the
technology, they were able to
diagnose some pretty complex
issues. We’d always wanted to
use VR in our usual operations
but had never managed to get
the team on board with it. Now
that we’ve used it and shown
how well it works, we’re using
VR in a lot of our design and
production work. It really
helped bring everyone along
with the ideas.
13,500
pairs of gloves were
donated to the NHS by
Ford’s Bridgend factory
16 www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk
/www.manufacturingmanagement.co.uk