Freightliner Custom Chassis Corp. (FCCC) broke ground yesterday for a new 200,000-square-foot logistics center in Gaffney, S.C. – a half mile away from the manufacturer’s current facility. A major player in chassis for commercial trucks and RVs, FCCC has experienced superior growth over the past 22 years, all without updating its original 280,000-square-foot facility.
“We’re sort of organized chaos,” quipped Steve Cain, FCCC’s materials and logistics manager. Average assembly time of a chassis, start to finish, is four hours. The manufacturer has three assembly lines, producing 112 chassis in a single shift. That’s one chassis every four minutes. “When FCCC first purchased this business from Oshkosh Truck in 1995, we produced 3,000 vehicles.” He paused briefly before adding, “Last year, we produced 24,000 vehicles.”
It was a whirlwind of moving parts that expanded from 7,000 to 15,000. A total of 400,000 of those pieces move through the facility per day – and you thought sorting LEGOS was hard.
But after a $22.7 million investment made by FCCC and parent company Daimler Trucks North America, the logistics center slated for completion by early 2018 will untangle and streamline the entire chassis-building process. Building from the ground up, this new sandbox kicked the adept, jigsaw-solving mind of Cain, a 38-year veteran in logistics, into high gear.
He wanted to design the additional facility to relieve congested space-constrain, and permit FCCC to pursue future manufacturing opportunities. This will allow them to move a significant amount of materials out of their production facility to do more “kitting” operations.
What makes manufacturing custom chassis so difficult is that most them are unusual. The kitting process works like a grocery trip. You have your list of foods, specific to your household. You go down the aisles selecting the quantity, ultimately delivering it home where the ingredients are assembled into a meal. In the case of FCCC’s chassis, they piece together individual units.
“To have a dedicated facility specifically for controlling, handling, and storing materials away from the manufacturing … is a logistics guy’s dream comes true,” Cain laughed. “This is kind of my baby.”
“This gives us the ability to be more custom than we are today,” added Manager of Product Marketing Bryan Henke.
Blueprints have been in Cain’s head for 10 years. Sketches on whiteboards and scraps came in varying iterations. Eventually Cain landed on an automated high bay storage system and Pick-by-Light order fulfillment. Instead of the kit operator walking with a paper list, they use a tablet with part numbers. Aisles with digital number displays indicate the quantity needed for brackets, alternators, battery cables, etc. Upon fulfilling the kit list, the final light turns green to proceed to the assembly line.
“There was a lot of wasted motion,” Cain said about their current process. Now, he continued, this prepackaged kit of pieces will permit maximum efficiency for assemblers and enhance product quality.
Another motivational cue for the expansion was to meet the ever-rising complexity of the technology going into the vehicles, of which FCCC added more models to its assembly lines. A brand-new chassis shipping facility is also in the works to double their capacity from 15 shift loads (about 45 RVs) to 30.
“We understand that the (RV) demographic is changing, so we’re gonna change right along with it,” said Henke. Those new products will be revealed at the RVIA trade show this November. “It’s premature to announce anything now,” he concluded, “but we’re proud to have the capability with the new logistics center.”
