Engineering360: "Eliminating Manufacturing Downtime: Production Issues with Tesla’s Model 3"

The fact that, “Actual production will move as fast as the least lucky efficient and least well-executed part of the entire Tesla production/supply chain system” should NOT have come as a surprise to Musk!

This brings to mind the concept of, "we'll set up a plant to build a new, high volume automobile, then a miracle happens, and we hit all our goals.

Anybody who has ever tried to build machinery knows that the process is only as fast as they hope it will be if they have planned each and every step with a "workaround" in case supplier X misses a commitment.

Quite right! Goldratt's "Theory of Constraints" has been around for over two decades now and is one of those MUST READ books for anyone manufacturing and assembling anything and it is quite certain that Mr. Musk is no stranger to its contents. The real question here is, are the Model 3 suppliers supplying conventional car manufacturers? If so, they are very savvy when it comes to automotive contracts and they will do everything to push prices up and delivery times out unless contractually bound to tight dates, fixed costs and delay/demurage penalties... One needs a very savvy purchasing department for this endeavor.

The basics of planning is Takt Time( Toyota Production System ) . When all the individual process cycle time is less than the Takt Time then the production target can be realised

In case of Tesla if Musk planned to produce 5000 vehicles per week and assuming working of 5 days a week the daily production would be 1000 vehicles

Ifdf two shift working is considered with 920 minutes/day then the takt time would be (920minutes x60 seconds)/1000(no of Vehicles) -, 55.2 seconds. Hence Musk has to map each process and do a gap analysis.Any Person who have exposure this concept can find the bottleneck(s) . This is simpler than Goldratt TOC