Wandering with Tedder and Tamara

Anyhow, the highlight of a motorcyclist's trip to Kansas City is to visit the Harley-Davidson assembly factory. It's a huge place, and they've added on in many places. They are focused on some modern processes- just-in-time manufacturing, completely empowered teams (no managers), processes to stop bad practices, to track and keep pride involved in (what should be) an inhuman production process.

The tours are set up acceptably. You just walk in a big loop through the main warehouse, with some detours and excursions for parts of the process that are “pretty” to watch. They use a lot of robots, and their paint shop is still a black box- they were implying that painters (and anyone in that area) had to follow guidelines about what soap they used to shower, what type of clothes outside work, deodorants (of course), but also what type of meals they at that day. I wonder if they are trying to reduce the gaseous emissions, or something else, like having really greasy hands?

The Sportster assembly line is one of the major areas of the factory. They have assembly on the inside of the warehouse, and on the edges of it are the subassemblies- for instance, building up the handlebars with grips, throttle, etc. It was neat to see all of the frames and painted parts lined up, ready for assembly. They claim the supply is JIT, about 2.5 days' worth. That sounds about right from what we could see.

We then saw where completed bikes are loaded onto a metal skid, and a cardboard box is put over to. It sounded like they can fit 40 of these crates in a tractor trailer rig.

After seeing the Sportster line, we walked over and watched part of the V-Rod line. They use a lot more outsourced parts for this- hydroformed frames, Marzocchi front suspension, etc. Still, it was neat to see the subassembly and assembly processes- stamping VINs, adding tires, etc. It is all done JIT, so each bike on the line is unique. It isn't unusual to see different colors, different rim combinations, and different destination countries in the same half-dozen “batch”.

From there we went over to the CVO operation. It's obvious the extra care here- engines are assembled in a more finicky manner, and bike assembly is done by one person. So “Bob” might assemble your bike from the frame up. If something goes wrong, he's responsible for making it right. We watched the first 105th anniversary model being inspected- they had started assembly that morning, so by about 1pm it was close to being done.

I'd definitely recommend this tour. Pretty neat! When I was done, I rode my bike up in front of the visitors center and took some pictures. Nobody was around, so I put my camera on another bikes' seat. I knew that would be okay because they had an Iron Butt license plate tag :-)