Nov 6 2012
Takt time – Early work at Junkers in Germany
In the TPS Only discussion group on LinkedIn, Joachim Knuf provided the following information, to which I have added a few illustrations:
“Junkers was building an aircraft for infantry support in 1917/18, the J4. After building airplanes in a handcraft mode for some years, this was the first attempt to meet larger demands. Junkers was known for not simply designing a product but the production process along with it. Clearly very lean and practiced by Toyota.”
The founder of the company was Hugo Junkers (pronounced ‘yoonkerz). He died in 1935 and was in no way affiliated with the Nazis, who took away his company and later besmirched his name by claiming association with it. Because the company still bore his name, it is linked in the minds of World War II forced laborers with their experience.
“The J4 was build in modules, incorporating components delivered from outside vendors, incorporating fixtures, templates and gauges for economic benefit. Subsequently, the F13, build in 1919/20 as the world’s first civilian passenger plane, was designed from the start with modular manufacturing in mind. This plane was built for customers around the world, with production numbers as high as 60/month.”
The only surviving J4, at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum.
Junkers F13 in 1925.
“Production was organized to an overall completion schedule. As a result, completion of modules had to be structured and synchronized. Final assembly was organized into six phases, performed at specific fixtures. Highly specialized work teams had a set amount of time to complete their fixture-based task, then moved on to the next fixture to repeat the job, followed by another specialized team (what we think of as a caravan system these days). The increment was the ‘progression interval’ (Fortschrittszeit). Airplanes/modules stayed in place. The result was a finished plane every 9 hours. This approach was shared with Junkers facilities working in other industries.
By 1926 this system was developed to the point that subassemblies could be produced off the main assembly and connected to it with moving lines that moved at set intervals. These intervals were then referred to as ‘Takte’ (plural, ‘takt intervals’). With the new W33/34 (first East-West Atlantic crossing in 1928), there was interest in the US to produce the plane in license, in preparation of which Junkers developed a complete production plan to allow large-scale production, identifying the most economical methods. At that point Junkers had 40% of the international market share. Some years later, Lufthansa orders for the new model Ju 52/3m required the further refinement of the ‘takt method’ (Taktverfahren), incorporating new technology and equipment.”
Junkers W34 at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum.
“After 1933 (and the nationalization of Junkers by the Nazis) this allowed the mass production of airplanes in serial assembly. To produce the required numbers of planes, eventually also using forced labor, Junkers began constructing large subassemblies in decentral locations within 20 miles of the main assembly facility, delivered just in time. Major subassemblies then moved down a ‘takt avenue’ (Taktstrasse) from station to station, remaining a uniform, prescribed ‘takt duration’ (Taktdauer) in each, creating the Junkers ‘Airplane High Volume Series Production to the Minute’ (Flugzeug-Grossreihenfertigung auf die Minute). Changes in takt were used to adjust production volume to demand. Continuous improvement was an integral aspect of this system (which also certified workers on their self-inspection skills).”
A 2010 video entitled Fischertechnik Taktstrasse mit Sortierung depicts a “Taktstrasse” as a transfer line.
Nov 11 2012
Takt time – Even more about origins in German aircraft manufacturing
Earlier this week, I ran into John Paxton’s 2008 paper called Myth vs. Reality: The Question of Mass Production in WW-II, in which he makes a convincing case that production methods were far more advanced in the US aircraft industry than in Germany or Japan. It is really not in doubt. The point in trying to understand the Junkers Taktsystem is simply as one of the sources of TPS. World War II German and Japanese engineers could design advanced planes, like the first jetfighter, the Messerschmitt 262 that you can see in the Smithsonian today, or the Mitsubishi Zero. But, in production, they could not come anywhere near the one-bomber-an-hour performance of Ford’s Willow Run plant.
Yesterday, I was able to go to the main library at Stanford University, where they have about one foot on one shelf in the basement with books on the German aircraft industry in World War II. including in particular Lutz Budrass’s work on the subject and Holger Lorenz‘s Kennzeichen Junkers. Budrass’s book is a forbidding 1,000 pages of small print with a few grainy pictures, long on armament policies and politics, but short on technology:
Lorenz’s book is much more accessible and contains many high-quality photographs, which contradict Paxton when he says:
What Paxton writes is not consistent with what little I have seen about the Junkers Taktsystem, and it is not consistent with the photographic evidence either, which shows that, at Junkers, the final assembly methods in the 1930s were eerily similar to those today for airliners, as you can see in the following side-by-side comparison:
Junkers clearly had a rolling assembly line, albeit one that, unlike the Boeing 737 line, was not continuously moving, Otherwise, the similarities extend even to the kits of parts that are rolled over to each plane. Of course, this is Junkers, not the whole of the German aircraft industry at the time, but Junkers is the one we are interested in, because of their Taktsystem and their transfer of this method to Mitsubishi aircraft in Nagoya, through which it reached Toyota. Other companies used a variety of methods. As we can see on the following picture Heinkel 111 bombers appear to have been assembled on fixed stations in 1939, but Messerschmitt fighters on assembly lines in 1943:
These and more pictures of German aircraft manufacturing before and during World War II are available from the Bundesarchiv Picture Database.
Upstream in fuselage assembly, the comparison looks as follows:
In 1934, for Ju-52 fuselages, Junkers used a nose-to-tail assembly line; in 1940, for the Ju-88, a side-by-side line. Today, Boeing 737 fuselage assembly, Spirit Aero in Wichita, KS, appears to be using parallel fixed stations. Fuselage assembly in this context, however, is limited to fastening together sections that have been assembled separately, with automated riveting.
Paxton’s article contains other assertions that are also difficult to accept. He claims, for example, that the abundance of cars in the US spread mechanical skills throughout the population and that these skills made it easier for large numbers of workers to learn how to build airplanes. He quotes the following statistics for the number of people per vehicle in different countries in 1926:
The US was the only country in which almost every family had one car, and American cars of that era were designed to be maintained by their owners. They came with a kit containing the necessary tools and instructions. The US aircraft industry during World War II, however, is known to have employed women in large numbers, as in the following photo of women installing fixtures and assemblies to a tail fuselage section of a B-17F Bomber (Library of Congress).
If do-it-yourself car maintenance pre-trained World War II aircraft workers in mechanics, then car maintenance must have been done by women. Single women in isolated farms certainly had no choice but to maintain their cars and tractors, but, in the culture of the 1920’s and 30’s, it is difficult to imagine that women who had a man at hand didn’t delegate changing spark plugs to him rather than learn it themselves. Paxton’s article also asserts that German aircraft production required skilled craftsmen, but most of it during the war was done by forced laborers from occupied countries who were not trained mechanics or machinists.
On the other hand, the article fails to mention two obvious reasons for the superior performance of aircraft manufacturing in the US:
The picture that emerges from the documents I have seen so far is that, in the late 1930s, Junkers had organized production in what is now called pulse lines. Final assembly was divided into operations of balanced durations, so that the planes didn’t move during operations but moved forward in unison at fixed time intervals, with upstream processes and the supply chain organized to support this mode of operation. And this is the Taktsystem that was taught to Mitsubishi Aircraft by Junkers engineers in 1942.
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By Michel Baudin • History • 4 • Tags: Aircraft production, Junkers, Takt, Takt time, Toyota