Didnt realise it had dropped so much

[Jesmol]

Let me add my $0.02

1: Steel has not gone up that much, certainly since 2006 the price today is almost the same as a final process coil (it went up seriously in 2008 but has dropped back). Better purchasing practices have in reality bought in lower prices than 2006.

2: Overhead costs - Not all overhead costs are fixed, approx 2/3 of overhead costs are classified as "variable" which means they get "flexed" to production. That's why both companies have severely reduced the number of indirect staff to cover the volume drops. (as with most of the supplier base). Also since 2006 Ford have been doing Dev work for OS Ford companies, allowing them to book off all of their Engineering resources to these projects taking a large chunk of cost of the AU books.

3: Outsourcing - Holden have done more outsourcing than Ford , but both still have major chunks of cost that can still be outsourced.

4: Supplier Profit - Both companies realise that they cannot survive without a viable supply base, so are doing a lot of development work with suppliers to bring in efficiencies. Most AU based suppliers a really a joke when it comes to efficiency and smart thinking. For example the front seats, there is only about 5% commonality in parts between red and blue including hardware. Vrtually no pressings are common, There would be significant gains from commonising the seat frames and structures.

5: Quality - Both Red & Blue are in continual phases of quality improvement, Holdens internal GCA audit target is around 80 , which equates to 1 warranty / customer complaint per car. Ford have always been the leader in quality system between the 2 companies, which has really shown in the FG . Previous models up to BF we really hampered by poor design and supplier constraints which did not drive improvements.

[phillyc]

This thread started from a 4 year old link.

[vanman_75]

the more efficiently ford au can make our falcon , the better chance we have of keeping it .
wasn't to hard to work out what the thread was about , old reference for comparison on where we are today , makes sense to me .
I don't know enough to know where or how they are outsourcing ,but i would ( as said many times) prefer to be making a good product with profit than making discount non profit vehicles way past its intended potential buyer base , I hate holden but they can only go on for so long the way they are , and we need them for our competition or we wont get to many improvements on our much loved falcon.

ford need to start reading the market trends and be the first in , instead of being the followers with innovations . but i think they are on their way , any profit is the first step , keep the quality up and the buyers will come .

[Fireblade]

Through continuous improvement, every improvement you can make in downtime reduction/speeding the process up can save a lot of time over a a long period of time and in course saves a lot of dollars in production costs. In turn better manufacturing processes can yield better quality and less customer complaints/warranty claims also saving a lot of money. I would almost bet the FG would cost less to build than the BF did, through much better manufacturing processes. Sometimes these improvements can cost the company zero dollars to implement but have considerable savings in the long term.

[vztrt]

Originally Posted by b0son

If that is indeed true, were we getting reamed hard in 2006...

There was a lot of waste at the start of 06 and there was a big efficiency push then. There were upgrades to certain parts of the plant that was either able to reduce heads or allow Ford to be more flexible with the models they ran down the line.