Published on March 7th, 2018 | by Sunit Nandi

Challenges of Making A Car – How Distribution and Warehousing Services Help

Making a car is more like solving a jigsaw puzzle where thousands of components are to be assembled in a logical sequence. The final product is an automotive assembled with only motive to provide a travel solution to the end user with advantages of safety and speed. To understand the challenges of making a car, let’s take a look at the car making process carried out in the factory first.

The complete process of car making involved steps such as:

Body Shopping

This process starts with sub-assembling various portions of the car base. The basic design comes into shape minus the roof and external frame. Initially, design is almost flat floor pan which is expanded further with the addition of certain assembled parts such as firewall between the motor and the passenger seat and likewise. Once base is done, the body sides are placed on to the mainframe.

And the final structure is completed with the addition of headlights, sidelights etc. Some manufacturing units position both the right and the left sides simultaneously which are further welded at all places in one go with the help of robots. And, finally, the roof of the car is placed. These are the few steps, broadly speaking, that contribute to the initial framing of the car.

Paint Shop

Once the body shop is completed, it is time to paint the car. Paint shop is done in invariably sterile environment. Some makers like https://www.merrittsupply.com/product-category/paints-primers/bottom-paints/ utilize electrostatic adhesion method to coat the paint on the body of the car. This is done with the help of pre-programmed robots, and the manual expertise. Experts comply with safety standards pertaining to use of personnel as well as combustible and solvents. Advanced methods of adhering and sealing paint, applicable as per the production policy of the company, are applied.

Final Assembly

It is preferred that automotive assembly line should be made flexible enough to make room for various changes or modifications felt necessary.

Important challenges and support offered by distribution and warehousing solutions

Looking at the whole process of car manufacturing, one can be sure of one thing that car making is a time and resource consuming process. This product is not the type that can be made in advance in excess to meet the anticipated demand. Its challenges are different. Some of which are:

Requirement of enormous space

Right from storing components to the final product, cars require lot of space to get manufactured. There will be requirement for storing the inventory of components, of the finished cars and also the cars under manufacturing need dedicated space to go through the assembling process uninhibitedly. Therefore, this process creates demand for warehousing experts that can provide extra spaces wherever needed. Cars may lay waiting for the takers who are made to go through lot of paperwork that may take time. Even the inventory needs to be placed logically for easy retrieval and fast application.

Management of Inventory

Just one component missing in the store can put the whole assembly line on a standstill. Both the under-supply and over-supply are not acceptable either. Therefore, proper inventory management plan is put in place for flawless functioning of the assembly line. There are distributions and warehousing experts that have proper place for storing and managing the inventory; many of the car manufacturing companies take help of these experts to manage inventory.

Automated process of assembling

The biggest challenge that comes with automated process of assembling is pertaining to the logical placement of the components. All the components to be assembled have to be placed in such a manner that the whole manufacturing bay is kept in motion. The automated process requires quite intelligent planning, and is fully dependent on the availability of components and their sequential arranging too. To meet this challenge, automotive logistics companies offer customized kitting services which are mainly focused upon easing the process of component arrangement and packing. When ordered from third party manufacturer, which is mostly the case is, the car makers can get the order dispatched in the sequence in which it is required in the process or get arranged the component in a form of kit allowing the makers to get all those required for certain assembling procedure in easily retrievable manner.

Quality checks

This is one of the biggest challenges that can surface up at any point during the manufacturing process. Right after the body shop, the makers may need doing quality checks to find if the basic model has been assembled in correct and robust manner or not. Thus, checks are to be placed at appropriate points as well as intervals to avoid repetition and missing out on anything important.

Thus, warehousing and distributions agents are definitely useful in carrying out the car manufacturing process seamlessly. It is the joint efforts of product managers, line managers, workers and the automotive logistics agents that result into making a car class apart.

Tags: car, challenges, distribution, help, making, services, warehousing

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.