Miscellaneous Definitions — accessories, trims, tools and general fashion terms from Apparel Search
Mass Production, also called flow production, is the production of large amounts of standardized products on production lines. It was popularized by Henry Ford in the early 20th century, although its underlying principles — standardization, interchangeable parts and the division of labor — were developed across the 19th century. In apparel, mass production is the system that turned clothing from a made-to-order trade into ready-to-wear sold from stock in graded sizes.
The economies of mass production come from several sources. The primary cause is a reduction of nonproductive effort of all types. In craft production, the craftsman must bustle about a shop, getting parts and assembling them. He must locate and use many tools many times, perhaps hundreds of times to assemble a complex product such as a clock.
In mass production, each worker repeats one or a few related tasks that use the same tool to perform identical or almost identical operations on a stream of products. The exact tool and parts are always at hand. The worker spends no time going and getting them.
Another important scale benefit is that the factory can purchase very large amounts of materials. This reduces the overhead costs (shipping, purchasing negotiations, paperwork, etc.) associated with purchasing the parts.
Mass production systems are usually organized in assembly lines. The assemblies pass by on a conveyor, or if they are heavy, hung from an overhead monorail.
In a factory for a complex product, rather than one assembly line, there may be many auxiliary assembly lines feeding sub-assemblies (i.e. car engines or seats) to a backbone "main" assembly line. A diagram of a typical mass-production factory looks more like the skeleton of a fish than a single line.
This is also used in food manufacture to produce foods continuously.
A final very important strategy is vertical integration. In this strategy, the manufacturer produces all or most of the parts and subassemblies that go into the product. For example, at one point, Ford Motor Company literally mined iron ore in Minnesota and turned it into cars in Detroit, capturing all the profits from all the processes that added value to iron ore.
Nowadays, rather than assembling everything, factory managers choose which assemblies to produce based on the return on investment (ROI) that each assembly process can produce. The basic plan is to outsource unprofitable subassemblies to other organizations. Often, such organizations can afford specialized equipment or organization that makes them substantially more efficient than an ordinary factory at a particular task.
While Ford was first to introduce mass production in recent times, the idea was first developed in Venice several hundred years earlier, where ships were mass-produced using pre-manufactured parts, and assembly lines.
The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day, in what was effectively the world's first factory that, at its height, employed 16,000 people.
Books were already mass produced since Johannes Gutenberg's Bible was published in the mid-1400s.
During the American Civil War, the Springfield Armoury started to mass produce guns, using interchangeable parts on a large scale. For this reason, even to this day the term 'Armoury Practice' is used in the USA to refer to mass production.
During the Industrial Revolution simple mass production techniques were used at the Portsmouth Block Mills to manufacture ships' pulley blocks for the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. It was also used in the manufacture of clocks and watches, and in the manufacture of small arms.
| Shop For Clothing |
|
|
| The above article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mass-production ). Some of the links have been modified. 2/7/06 |
| Fashion Industry |
Standardize, Divide, FlowMass production stands on three legs. The first is standardization: the product is fixed in a specification, and every unit is made to it, so unit ten thousand matches unit one. The second is interchangeable parts: components made to tolerances close enough that any part fits any unit, removing the fitter's file work that once matched each part to one product by hand. The third is division of labor arranged as flow: the work is broken into short operations, each worker or machine repeats one operation, and the product moves past them — on a line, a conveyor or a bundle system — accumulating operations until it is finished. Together the three principles collapse unit cost: expensive skill is concentrated in designing the product and the line, while the line itself runs on repetition, speed and volume. Henry Ford's moving assembly line of the early 20th century popularized the system so completely that mass production is often treated as his invention. The principles are older — armories had pursued interchangeable parts through the 19th century, and pin makers had demonstrated divided labor long before — but Ford proved the full combination at a scale and a price that reset public expectations: a complex machine, the automobile, became cheaper every year it was produced in greater numbers. That inversion, where volume lowers price and lower price enlarges volume, is the economic engine inside the definition, and it applies to any industry whose products can be standardized. Mass Production in the Clothing TradeClothing reached mass production by a slightly different road, because cloth is soft and sizes vary with bodies. The enabling standardizations were the graded pattern — one design scaled through a size range by fixed rules — the standardized size itself, cutting many layers of cloth at once with power knives, and the sectional sewing line, in which a garment's construction is divided into operations distributed among machine operators. Ready-to-wear is mass production's clothing form: garments made in quantity, in advance, in standard sizes, bought from stock. The system put a new suit or dress within reach of buyers who could never have commissioned a tailor, and it built the modern fashion industry's structure of seasons, size ranges and volume retailing on top of factory flow. The limits of mass production define its modern successors. A line tooled for one standardized product changes slowly and expensively, so fashion — which sells change itself — balances mass production against smaller runs, quick response and postponement of final decisions such as dyeing and finishing. Mass customization and on-demand cutting attempt to keep the cost structure of flow while softening its uniformity. None of that alters the term's core meaning: the production of large amounts of standardized products on production lines, the system that industrial society uses whenever sameness, volume and low unit cost matter more than individual variation. Common QuestionsWhat is mass production?Mass production is the production of large amounts of standardized products on production lines. It is also called flow production because partly finished goods move through a sequence of operations, each adding the same step. Who popularized mass production?Henry Ford popularized mass production in the early 20th century with the moving assembly line for automobiles. The principles behind it — interchangeability and divided labor — are older, but Ford's system demonstrated their scale. How did mass production change clothing?Mass production made ready-to-wear clothing practical at low cost: standardized sizes, patterns graded across a size range, and garments cut in bulk and sewn in operation sequences, sold from stock instead of made to individual order. More to ExploreMore from Apparel Search: Miscellaneous Definitions | Clothing Industry Glossary | Fashion Terms | Apparel Search Home
|