From the Model T to today's "lean manufacturing": the assembly line as crucial, yet controversial, agent of social and economic transformation. The mechanized assembly line was invented in 1913 and has been in continuous operation ever since. It is the most familiar form of mass production. Both praised as a boon to workers and condemned for exploiting them, it has been celebrated and satirized. (We can still picture Chaplin's little tramp trying to keep up with a factory conveyor belt.) In America's Assembly Line, David Nye examines the industrial innovation that made the United States productive and wealthy in the twentieth century. The assembly line—developed at the Ford Motor Company in 1913 for the mass production of Model Ts—first created and then served an expanding mass market. It also transformed industrial labor. By 1980, Japan had reinvented the assembly line as a system of “lean manufacturing”; American industry reluctantly adopted the new approach. Nye describes this evolution and the new global landscape of increasingly automated factories, with fewer industrial jobs in America and questionable working conditions in developing countries. A century after Ford's pioneering innovation, the assembly line continues to evolve toward more sustainable manufacturing.

Efficient assembly line design is a problem of considerable industrial importance. Assembly Line Design will be bought by technical personnel working in design, planning and production departments in industry as well as managers in industry who want to learn more about concurrent engineering. This book will also be purchased by researchers and postgraduate students in mechanical, manufacturing or micro-engineering.

The man the Detroit Free Press calls "a blue collar Tom Wolfe" delivers a full-barreled blast of truth and gritty reality in Rivethead, a no-holds-barred journey through the belly of the American industrial beast.

​Assembly Line Planning and Control describes the basic fundamentals of assembly lines for single model lines, mixed model make-to-stock lines, mixed model make-to-order lines and for one-station assembly. The book shows how to select the quantity of units to schedule for a shift duration, compute the number of operators needed on a line, set the conveyor speed, coordinate the main line with sub-assembly lines, assign the work elements to the operators on the line, sequence the models down the line, sequence the jobs down the line, calculate the part and component requirements for a line and for each station, determine the replenish needs of the parts and components from the suppliers, compute the similarity between the models being produced and show applications, use learning curves to estimate time and costs of assembly, and measure the efficiency of the line. The material is timeless and the book will never become obsolete. The author presents solutions with easy-to-understand numerical examples that can be applied to real-life applications.​

The Color Line and the Assembly Line tells a new story of the impact of mass production on society. Global corporations based originally in the United States have played a part in making gender and race everywhere. Focusing on Ford Motor Company’s rise to become the largest, richest, and most influential corporation in the world, The Color Line and the Assembly Line takes on the traditional story of Fordism. Contrary to popular thought, the assembly line was perfectly compatible with all manner of racial practice in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa. Each country’s distinct racial hierarchies in the 1920s and 1930s informed Ford’s often divisive labor processes. Confirming racism as an essential component in the creation of global capitalism, Elizabeth Esch also adds an important new lesson showing how local patterns gave capitalism its distinctive features.

The book deals with two main decision problems which arise when flow-line production systems are installed and operated. The assembly line balancing problem consists of partitioning the work, necessary to assemble the product(s), among different stations of an assembly line. If several models of a product are jointly processed on a line, this medium-term problem is connected with the short-term problem of determining an operating sequence of the models. In Part I balancing and sequencing problems are discussed, classified, and arranged within a hierarchical planning system. In the present second edition special emphasis is given to u-shaped assembly lines which are important components of modern just-in-time production systems. Part II is concerned with exact and heuristic procedures for solving those decision problems. For each problem type considered, a survey of existing procedures is given and new efficient solution methods are developed. Comprehensive numerical investigations showing the effectiveness of the new methods and their superiority over existing approaches are reported.

This book attempts to treat line design and its related subjects in a cohesive manner, with an emphasis on design applications. It discusses general guidelines for setting up assumptions and determining line performance parameters, based on empirical data from literature reports.