After Two Expedition/Navigator Production Increases, Ford Can Finally Advertise
Plant expansion required $25 million investment
The large traditional utility market is a Tahoe/Suburban/Yukon world, and GM has made up roughly three-quarters of the market for quite some time. But the Ford Expedition's incursion into this territory (and the Lincoln Navigator's into Escalade-land) has been significant enough to warrant some innovative rearranging of the furniture and work procedures at the plant that builds Ford's jumbo utes to keep up with demand.
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This was not trivially easy to do, as the Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville (which also makes Ford F-Series Super Duty trucks) has been running pretty much at capacity since the new all-aluminum Expedition and Navigator launched at the end of 2017. But these new utes are finally good enough to give the GM jumbos a run for their money. As a result, demand has risen sharply—retail Expedition sales are up 35 percent (improving market share by 5.6 percentage points, to 17.5 percent) while total Navigator sales are up 70 percent. This greater-than-anticipated increase in demand necessitated a 20 percent bump in production capacity last summer (combined production of the two utes ended up increasing 62.4 percent from 2017 to 2018). And that's still not enough—the company is rolling out yet another 20 percent increase this summer. How is Ford doing this in a plant that's officially been "at capacity" from the beginning?
The first increase mostly snatched low-hanging fruit. The management team worked with the folks building the trucks to find efficiencies. They rearranged some workstations and subdivided some assembly procedures to allow the line speed to increase. The forthcoming increase took a bit more doing—and a $25 million investment in improving the space efficiency within the final assembly area in this plant, which cannot easily be expanded.
Prior to this recent investment, the doors stayed on the Expedition and Navigator from paint through final assembly. This meant that, during the entire interior assembly process, the line required 5.5 feet of additional width so the doors could remain open. This also increased the time associates spent walking from the parts bin to the interior. Big time-waster. Now the doors part ways with the body and run down their own separate skinny assembly line (as is done in many if not most assembly plants nowadays) and reunite with the body after the interior's finished.
