Outbound. Defying the gravity of production.
Challenge 1 - Rapid Growth
With the impending launch of Model 3 at the Fremont factory, the daily production volume would soon become three to five times of the production of Models S & X. This would require a complete rethink of the flows.
Challenge 2 - Out of Space
The growth in production volume has a compounding effect on the already overloaded outbound yard. The capacity of between 4-500 finished vehicles was clearly inadequate, unless the cars would leave the yard much faster.
Challenge 3 - Contribute Cash
From cash perspective, delivering the newly produced in less than 20 days, globally, was required to avoid straining the company’s cash position. With a relatively high number of vehicles being delivered in USA, this portion of the flow received extra attention.
Solution
A new solution required strong cross functional collaboration and joint ideation to ensure that procurement, inbound logistics of components, production, and the resulting outbound flow would be highly synchronised. The process gave birth to the outbound flow of the 21st century.
As a first step, the complete engagement with the fleet of truck suppliers had to be revamped to ensure that loading could continue 24/7.
Then the parking lines of the entire outbound yard were removed over a weekend, and replaced with 25 load lanes, market to hold a vehicle truck and up to 8 Tesla vehicles, subject to model.
In parallel, our tech colleagues crafted the code that enable scanning of the new “QR”- type of vehicle identification number, allow the yard work to give the driver a “boarding card” identifying the loading lane the car should be parked in.
The truck driver would load the vehicles and collect the “boarding cards”, which were scanned before the truck would be allowed to leave the yard.
The resulting 24/7 operations became an ant’s next of activity, with cars entering the yard and trucks leaving for domestic destinations, the rail stations, or the port of San Francisco.