After 30 years in the stamping business, BAE Industries Inc. (Auburn Hills, MI) now delivers complete seat latch and cushion latch assemblies to Lear Corp. (Southfield, MI) for the sport utility vehicle seats Lear supplies to General Motors Corp. (Detroit). The latches secure the second row and third row seats. Now, the company has the capacity to produce more than 200,000 seat latch assemblies a month in an area less than 6,000 square feet, thanks to modular assembly systems built with standard components from Bosch Automation Products (Buchanan, MI). The first three-pallet based, power-and-free Bosch TSplus went into production in January 2000. Six months later, when 2001 model vehicles were launched, BAE expanded one of the lines and added a fourth to keep up with increasing volume.
"Because everything is modular, we have great flexibility in configuring the lines, which allows us to do a lot of operations in a small space," says Mark Doetsch, corporate quality manager. "None of us has much previous experience with modular conveyors or structural framing, but we were able to design what we needed without much trouble." After debugging at BAE's main plant, each line was disassembled and reinstalled in a new facility. The entire move was completed within a week, and installation required only five people.