Brazilian Ford Plant

[GeneW]

Located in Northern Brazil. Highly automated, very flexible. One of the amazing innovations is that Ford has their vendors do assembly of their contracted subassemblies right in the plant itself. They're fed directly to the lines on a JIT basis.

This helps reduce vendor costs because the value added labor is done close to the line, reducing the "cycle time".

http://info.detnews.com/video/index.cfm?id=1189

I don't know if Toyota does this or whether they just keep the vendor's operations "close by".

Gene