Ford's Chicago Campus

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The Chicago Manufacturing Campus, located just a quarter of a mile east of the Torrence Avenue Assembly Plant, is a groundbreaking development. The retooled Torrence Avenue Plant, now supported by a state-of-the-art supplier campus, will produce two new Ford models -- the Ford Freestyle and Ford Five Hundred, and one new Mercury - the Mercury Montego.
The recently completed 155-acre supplier park houses nine of the auto-maker's top-tier parts suppliers in four buildings, consisting of 1.6 million square feet of manufacturing space. Proximity to the Torrence Avenue facility allows the suppliers to produce parts and immediately send them to the assembly line, eliminating the inefficiencies associated with transporting and storing inventories.

The supplier park sets Torrence Avenue apart from other manufacturing facilities. Rather than having its suppliers in various geographic locations around the Midwest, they are now centralized in an industrial condominium complex near the assembly plant. As a result, the average distance for a given part to the assembly line has been reduced from 425 miles to 125 miles. Ford will also see the gains in efficiency on total assembly time, as mistakes and quality issues can be quickly addressed at the source before production continues. Key to the process is the increased level of communication between Ford and its suppliers, and between the individual suppliers.

The location of the campus, and the implementation of a just-in-time manufacturing model, result in dramatic reductions in inventory and shipping costs and provide more flexibility for the Torrence Avenue plant. In fact, the plant is one of several of Ford's North American plants being adapted for flexible manufacturing, which allows several different automobile models to be built on a single assembly line. Not only will Ford be able to reduce its manufacturing costs, but also it will be able to modify its assembly lines to produce the most in-demand model.

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