Assembly Line Factory Tour

Shenzhen Adventure Day 4

At the AQS plant we also got to see the final assembly of a printer. This was really awesome. Printers are super complicated builds so they basically have to be done by hand. Essentially what happens is they have stations with a couple of tasks on them. A person performs the task, scans a barcode on the item, then passes the cart to the next person. There were 100-200 stations for this printer. The barcodes let them make sure each printer has had all steps and also lets a control center monitor to make sure that they are on point for meeting the quota for that day and hour. What’s cool is that each station has an instruction booklet which sets the task. The entire line is essentially a very long pipeline, so they have to carfully balance the pipeline to prevent bottlenecks and keep throughput high. It takes multiple revisions to get it right. Apparently setting up such a line, from end to end, is 3-6 months. Each printer is also fully tested.

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