Ford and the Moving Assembly Line

In 1913, Ford's Highland Park plant introduced the moving assembly line. Within a year the time to build a Model T collapsed from roughly twelve hours to about ninety minutes. Instead of skilled workers walking around a stationary car, the car moved past stationary specialists, each doing one task. Ford then shocked the industry by doubling wages to five dollars a day, a move critics called charity and he called strategy. Per-unit costs fell so fast rivals could not follow without rebuilding everything they had.

This case sharpens the difference between optimizing a process and rethinking it from the ground up. It is easy to make existing steps faster; it is far harder to ask whether the sequence itself should exist. Open the app to map a core workflow in your own business and find where people are still walking around the car.