20141211 Toyota Princeton Plant Visitor Center

Cameras (and cell phones) are not allowed in the plant tour of the plant. But they do have a rather fancy visitor center. So while waiting for the tour I took pictures of most of the signs and displays including the "exploded" truck hanging in the middle of the room. The plant has two assembly lines and the tour covers the mini-van line. They made a big deal that this was the first American plant to be a "mother" plant to a new plant, in this case one being built in Texas. The idea is that this plant mentors the new plant during design and startup.

The plant is expanding because of the success of their Highlander SUV.

After two years I still have not figured out how to properly present the photos in a blog posting, so I'm just going to do a photo dump. Below are the raw notes I wrote when I got home knowing I would not be able to remember the facts when I did write a posting.

Over a 1000 acers, 90 of which are under roof. 

Including contractors, about 6000 people a day come through the turnstiles. 4900 of them are "team members." 

A van comes off the line every 91 seconds, so each team member has to do their job in less than 91 seconds. They do a job for 2 hours, and they do 4 different jobs. They run a "blue" and "gold" shift leaving plenty of time for maintenance. The colors come from the state flag. Assist machines help with the heavy lifting and some plastic parts are pre-heated to make them more pliable and easier to install. 

It takes 22 hours to assemble a van, 10 of which are spent in the paint department. They assemble a van from coils of steel and plastic pellets. 9 injection molds are used to produce the plastic parts. The biggest stamping machine produces 4600 tons to create the entire side of the van. 

Most of the vehicles are shipped by train -- NS and CSXT -- with NS getting most of the traffic.

The line was about four or five rows long. On our tour, one of the rows was not moving because of a glitch and the workers were standing around. But the other rows were still moving. After the tour, I asked some questions back in the Visitor Center. They confirmed that there is a buffer between each row. Of course I now can't remember the number of vans that can be held in the buffer. But it was quite a few because I kept an eye on that row, and it was down the entire time we could see it. The ceiling is very high and the space between the work floor and the ceiling is full of van conveyors to create the buffer lines. I forgot to ask if the workers on that row will have to work through the break that happens every two hours (one of which is lunch) to help clean out their buffer and replenish the buffer for the next row.

They showed us the boxes of turkeys near the exit and said that a turkey will be given to each employee as they leave for the holidays.