Retooled Assembly Line

General Motors, Wentzville, MO

Services

Complicated retooling of lines. Creation and installation of individual tools to ergonomic specifications. At project completion, the team provided 62,258 man hours.

---

Challenges

• Construction had to be conducted during line outages, requiring a majority of the work and testing to be completed during the plant’s annual two-week shutdown.

• If construction resulted in any unplanned loss of the manufacturer’s production time, it cost General Motors $10,000 for each minute of delay.

• The scope changed throughout the project, and the introduction of new tools onto the line often affected adjacent operations.

• The project required addressing functional as well as ergonomic issues for the new tooling line.

Achievements

Complexity or uniqueness of project
Any time there are thousands of small projects involved, the level of complexity rises. The coordination, timing and communication that must take place can be intense. To reduce the potential for assembly line work stoppage, the team coordinated the installation of tools in temporary locations, which required installation of additional support steel and utilities, but kept the line moving.

Adapting to surroundings
To get equipment and tools across the plant quickly, a flat bed golf cart was customized into a mobile unit that only took a matter of minutes to reach areas across the 95-acre manufacturing facility.

Surpassing quality expectations
Every piece of the customer’s equipment was checked during installation to ensure they were ergonomically correct. And, after permanent tooling was in place, 20 stayed on site to make changes or adjustments to the new line during initial production.

Results

Upon completion of one of the largest tooling moves in GM history, the assembly plant was able to produce $1.2 million worth of product every hour.

_{Projects completed prior to 2005 were performed by McCarthy.}

---

Honors & Awards

• St. Louis Associated General Contractors, Keystone Award Finalist