Ford demos latest digital tools at flagship transmission plant

Ford recently provided media with a look at some of its latest digital manufacturing tools, opening up the floor at one of the world's largest transmission plants to showcase the quality- and productivity-driven initiative. The tour of Ford's Livonia Transmission Plant (LTP) was part of a Detroit-area Manufacturing in America conference hosted by Siemens. Though showcasing the latest tools in use today, Ford stressed that this was a journey that began in earnest over a decade ago-and is only just beginning to be leveraged.

The digital systems Ford is employing permit a more efficient path between its computer-aided engineering (CAE), the creation of production/supply systems and the assembly process itself, improving quality by validating metrics in real time and gathering a swarm of data for analysis. Exceptional granularity in its component traceability provides a wealth of on-site data to improve quality, but leveraging such data in the cloud also can improve vehicle-specific characteristics at distant, final-assembly locations.