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The Plan
Long before the move was announced, all the guesswork had to be taken out of the transfer. Chance Vought, once it had laid its plans, needed no crystal ball to know how it would fit into the Texas plant. Yet to many, it seemed like sleight-of-hand. Observers saw thousands of machines whisked away from Stratford, reappearing a few days later at a predetermined spot in the Texas plant, wired and ready to turn out parts. Dozens of Navy Corsairs rolled steadily off the Stratford assembly line as the equipment that had formed their parts moved out around them. The details of the F6U-1 Pirate were made and sub-assembled in Connecticut. In Texas, trained men miraculously waited to pick up as Stratford workers left off. The timing was as perfectly controlled and gradual as the movement of sands through an hourglass. It was not done, as one astonished onlooker guessed, by having the workers ride the freight cars and run the machines as they went. It was done through meticulous, scientific planning.
The first rough, overall planning took place in the Spring of 1947 when the men who had made the original surveying trip got together their findings from, not only that trip and from subsequent visits, but from plot plans and blueprints, and a mountain of data sent to them by the Dallas business men. The “Proposal for Occupancy of Stand-by Plant at Dallas, Texas”, containing detailed descriptions and comparisons of the Dallas and Stratford plants, advantages and disadvantages in the occupancy of the Dallas plant, a proposal for the timing of the move, estimates of the cost of the move and a suggestion for the disposal of the Stratford plant, convinced the Navy and the United Aircraft men that the Chance Vought transfer was in the best interest of the company and the country, and could be carried out. The men who planned the move projected themselves into the future. They foresaw the problems that would arise and thought of solutions before the questions had a chance to come up.
The initial plan was centered around the aircraft scheduled to be procured during 1947 and 1948, a period of transition from conventional airplanes to jet-propelled craft. This transition tied in neatly with the proposed move. Obviously, it was not a good idea to shut down the Stratford plant, throwing some 6,000 persons out of work, and to start a plant at Dallas with the expectation of hiring 6,000 there at once. The resultant turmoil would have disrupted two communities, to say nothing of Chance Vought’s production schedules. A gradual shutdown of the Stratford plant with a simultaneous build-up of the Texas plant was the goal of the planners. With the two types of aircraft scheduled, the original plan called for the completion of one, the F4U-5 Corsair, in Stratford; the beginning of the other, the F6U-1 Pirate, in Dallas. In the basic timing of Chance Vought’s manufacture, the fabrication of detail parts precedes completion of an airplane by about six months. The machinery which had produced the Corsair parts in Stratford could be shipped to Dallas and used there to manufacture the Pirate details while assembly of the Corsairs was taking place. And when the Corsairs were put together, assembly fixtures could go off to Dallas, where completed Pirate parts would be ready for the line.
Smooth as the system seems, much laborious charting preceded its carrying out. During the long negotiations for the transfer, production schedules changed. Fifteen times the industrial engineers who charted detail plans, worked up different layouts and manpower schedules. One was a plan for an immediate, all-at-once move, which was, of course, discarded. How the details of one of these sets of plans evolved is a miracle of precision and coordination. Taking the plan from the beginning, R. A. Tipple, chief industrial engineer, obtained from J. J. Hospers, Chance Vought’s sales manager, and from George Shaw, of the manufacturing planning and scheduling group, details of current production contracts. More than immediate production was important in laying out a new plant. Hospers, being in close touch with the military organizations and with aircraft development in other firms, was well informed as to tactical problems and requirements of the armed forces for military craft, and with trends in the industry as to design and material. Such knowledge was useful in laying out the plant so that there would be a minimum of rearrangement of departments and equipment in the new plant in the future, when new planes were built.
Tipple turned the material on immediate production over to Hugh Stack, supervisor of the estimating group, for manpower analysis. Stack had had plenty of experience with forecasting manpower requirements, but the problem turned over to him when the move was finally made, was a stickler. A contract for the Corsairs was unfinished in Stratford. Details and subassembly for the Pirate were also slated for Stratford. They would go to Dallas for final assembly. Predicting Corsair man-hours was a cut-and-dried process to Stack and his forecasters. The Pirate, however, was a new plane. For the workers making parts in Stratford and assembling them, there would be a “learning curve” when high man-hours went into the plane. In Dallas, where new workers would take over final assembly, more learning entered into the picture. It was a puzzle to compute, but Stack and his men finally came up with a chart of manpower to turn out the Pirates over the term of delivery dates Hospers had outlined to the Navy.
Once the forecasters had determined the total number of man-hours that would be required to produce a batch of airplanes, they broke their findings down to show exactly in what department, at what operation, and in what month the manpower would be needed, both in Stratford and in Dallas. A personnel man could put his finger on a certain week in a certain month and know that he would have to have so many skilled machinists at work that week, and so many sheet metal workers. This was the basis upon which the number of persons to be transferred from each department, their time of transfer, the number of persons to be hired, and the time of their hiring was determined. Sometimes estimates had to be prepared in a hurry. One Friday, while negotiations for transfer were under way, a call came from Washington to have a manpower estimate for a certain expected move date ready by Monday. Stack and his boys worked through Saturday and Sunday and, haggard and eyesore, quit their desks at three o’clock Monday morning. The reports were in the mail.
When the 5,000 ton Erie Press, with its hot forming table so vital to aircraft operations, had to be moved; production men asked the estimators: “Can you figure out a plan for production to get far enough ahead of schedule so that the press can be out of commission for three months”? The estimators shifted workers here, changed the order of an operation there, and the Erie Press got its work done, and a three-month vacation.
Since one of the motives for moving was to achieve a more efficient operation, the planning of the physical layout to minimize handling was all-important. It was not a matter of picking up everything at Stratford and putting it down again in the same sequence in Dallas. To get the most benefit out of the improved Dallas location, a lot of studying had to be done on the best set-up of the departments in relation to each other, and the best set-up of each department within itself. Tipple brought back from his first trips to Dallas overall layouts of the plant. He turned them over to his assistant, Bob Lavers, and to Matt Kenney and Dick Rice, layout specialists, and others. The industrial engineers, working with production heads, and considering the airplanes that would be built and might be built in the future, laid out the departments to achieve the best possible material flow with the least handling.
From time to time, Tipple, or one of his group supervisors, would go to Dallas to inspect the plant and compare it with plans, bringing the blueprints up to date, adding a wall or a door that had been installed since the plans were made. After planning the space and area for each unit, the layout men tackled the detailed location of the equipment within the units. Working with tiny, exact scale gummed paper templates, they made a small replica of each section, with its machines, benches, and shelves in place. They took into consideration electrical outlet positions and the location of craneways on the ceiling. They consulted with architects as to whether the floor at a certain location would stand the strain of a heavy machine. Their work was done with three dimensions in mind: floor area alone was not enough to consider in the layouts. Height of ceilings at all points was important too, for many of Chance Vought’s mammoth machines were more than a story high. Finally, floor plans for each unit went through the safety and fire departments for their o.k.
In laying out units which required processing tanks, the trends in aircraft material and its treatment entered the picture. Stainless steel or magnesium might be replacing aluminum in future years. Accordingly, engineers allotted space for processing these metals. One factor, which intensified the complexity of the plans, was a proposed expansion schedule. Many new machines and additional equipment had been ordered, for one of the things that Chance Vought hoped to accomplish in the move was an increased independence from subcontractors. Therefore, the layout engineers had to incorporate into their plans, machines that had not yet been acquired, to perform functions not handled previously in Chance Vought. Layout men worked closely with foremen and supervisors in locating equipment, and, with department heads, coordinated the whole.
How were individual pieces of equipment to be scheduled for transfer? How could Chance Vought keep a finger constantly on the whereabouts of its shifting machinery and furniture? That was one of the most perplexing questions of the move. An inventory was the first step in this direction. While Chance Vought had a complete list of fixed assets in its purchasing and procurement department, this list was too complex to be used in the move. A milling machine might be listed on one card, while its motor would appear on another and other accessories on still other cards. Since the milling machine would be moved as a unit, however, it must be catalogued as a unit on the equipment move schedule. Larry Held, an industrial engineer who had charge of arranging the equipment move schedule, got together more than a hundred persons from various departments. With other engineers, he had prepared kits containing forms and instructions telling the inexperienced inventory takers just what information they were to gather, and how to fill out and code the inventory forms. In three days, Held and his crew took an entire inventory of machines, benches and furniture. The forest of equipment had been compressed into one of the most valuable lists of information in the transfer. From it, each piece of equipment was translated to an IBM card. These equipment cards were arranged by month in accordance with the master move schedule, a bar graph made up by the industrial engineers to show the months in which each unit would make its move.
 At intervals, Held broke down monthly equipment move schedules into weekly schedules, after consultation with department heads. These equipment schedules provided one man, whose unique job was to tag the machines slated for transfer, with a guide for his activities. Each week, he singled out and tagged the machines to be moved. The tags were signals to the maintenance section that the machinery or furniture was to be picked up for the trip to Texas. Later, the tags showed workers in Dallas where the machinery was to be placed.
Thus, the basic plans for the Dallas move were laid. There were last minute changes, both major and minor, the most drastic being the decisions to build the new engineering building and the new hangar. But the changes brought about little delay. By now, with many sets of rapidly made plans behind them, the industrial engineers were geared for speed.  By the time the first freight car rolled out, plans were at hand showing, to the inch, the location of each machine on the factory floor at Dallas and its time of arrival. There was a chart estimating the movement of freight cars in each week and month of the move. And the mountain of plans made by the industrial engineering section had been reduced to one master move chart, showing, by months, the time when each department would shift its operations to Dallas. Throughout the move, detailed floor plans were periodically made, showing the areas vacated in Stratford and occupied in Dallas.
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