The A13 is not an exciting road. For most of its 42 miles, it is the embodiment of dreary tedium as it meanders from Southend, through the marshland of South Essex and into London. However, there is one sight along the way that should rouse even the weariest of travellers from their boredom. Three huge wind turbines, each twice the height of Nelson’s Column, loom over the surrounding area, signalling an important landmark on the British manufacturing map. Welcome to Ford’s Dagenham Engine Plant.
Investing in technology
The wind turbines are an immediate indication of the eco-friendly ethos that now surrounds the factory – and Ford in general. “Energy savings are not an afterthought,” explains Martin Tomkins, Dagenham Engine Plant’s engineering manager. “They are an integral part of everything we do as a business.”
Nowhere is this more evident than on the new production line, named Panther, which opened earlier this year. A two-year, £475 million investment (including nearly £9m from the government), Panther is the first line at Dagenham to use a technology called minimum quantity lubrication (MQL). MQL replaces the traditional need for coolant (a mix of oil and water) to keep machines running at the correct temperature by replacing it with a fine mist of lubricant. This, as Alison Cox, supervisor for Ford’s powertrain manufacturing engineering (PTME), environmental and quality operating systems, explains, saves a vast amount of water: “In the past, we had about 100,000 litres of coolant flowing continuously around the plant, being cooled by vast external chillers to keep it at the right temperature. Just doing that used a huge amount of energy. Coolant was probably one of our biggest users of energy. With MQL you get rid of about 98% of the water needed, which obviously also has a huge impact on the amount of energy we need to use to keep it at the right temperature.”
To put the savings into perspective, Ford estimate that MQL will save around 17.5 million litres of water per year – enough to fill seven Olympic-sized swimming pools.
MQL also means less oil is found in the air and around the general environment. As well as making the site a more attractive and safer place to work, the lack of a thin veneer of oil means less water is used to clean the equipment and work area than in other areas of the plant.
Another extremely effective energy-saving tactic from the Panther line, which is now being rolled out site-wide, is the installation of LED lighting. “Everywhere we develop, the directive now is to fit LED lighting,” explains Tomkins. Ford estimate that the move to low-energy bulbs has saved almost 250,000kWh of energy annually at Dagenham – enough to power 160 homes in the UK for a year. And the impact isn’t just in energy savings. The staff and overall company are benefitting as well. “People walk through the new engine line, see how well-lit it is and ask why they can’t have it in their area,” Wood adds. This has been given added credence by an ILO report, which discovered that improved lighting in factories led to a 10% increase in productivity and a 30% reduction in errors.
Culture shift
On-site, the staff are also encouraged to do their bit. “For example, we have tried to gradually increase people’s awareness of simple things like recycling segregation,” continues Tomkins. “As a site, we have been complemented on our processes for that, and how much it has improved over time. A lot of that is simply down to the increased awareness of our employees and how what they do can impact the whole site, down to things like the cost of processing waste and so on.”
“There have been some step changes in technology, but a lot of our success is down to small, incremental changes in processes,” adds Cox. “We have, for example, encouraged people stop rushing off home at the end of the day. Instead, they have a checklist to make sure their machines are turned off. We have been able to save a lot of energy just through putting signs on the machines reminding operators to turn them off.”
Ford started setting energy targets per engine produced in 2011. Now, each employee is given specific environmental goals relating to a number of measures: the amount of energy, water and hydrocarbons (metalworking fluids, coolants, etc.) used per unit, plus the amount of waste sent to landfill per unit.
“Those four key targets apply across all Ford PTME plants, including engine plants like Dagenham and also transmission plants such as we have in Bordeaux,” says Cox.
Some of these targets have already been met at Dagenham: most notably, the plant is already at zero waste to landfill – down from over 0.9kg per engine produced in 2011. But that isn’t stopping them, as Cox explains: “We obviously can’t do any better than zero waste to landfill, so we’re now looking at total waste. For example, we have loads of plastic that comes in via packaging. Sure, it goes to get recycled, but even that still has a financial and environmental cost. We are looking to reduce the amount of plastic we have to deal with.”
One of the more ingenious ways Ford have combatted the packaging problem is through the use of what they call ‘Chip and Ship’. Empty frame trays, which have arrived on-site full of parts from suppliers, are put into a shredder, which turns the plastic trays into chips. This saves around 80% of the volume compared to a complete tray, reducing the number of journeys needed – and thus lessening the environmental impact – to return them to the supplier. Back at the supplier, the chips are mixed with 20% virgin material and fed straight back into moulds, meaning in effect the same tray material can go back and forth to Dagenham and other Ford PTME plants for years.
Cox adds that the change in procedure has been met with very little resistance from the team at the site. And, it has been achieved without any specific environmental ‘champions’ within the teams. “The plant has a designated environmental control engineer, but each Ford plant has environmental targets to achieve,” she says. “This means that many people on the engineering level, who don’t have the word ‘environmental’ in their job title, will have personal goals on their personal objectives against the overall plant goals on energy per unit, and so on. This means they are able to introduce various initiatives into the site – many of our plants have specialised energy teams within them that look to reduce waste and energy use.”
The plant’s management team monitors not just the energy used in the building (Dagenham have installed a new building management system to look for inefficiencies in any of the machinery operations), but also the way the people are working. The same overall targets are set for every member of staff, from the top down. How these are measured, Cox says, depends on the individual: “It may be that they are charged with the delivery of a single item of equipment which could be directly measured to quantify its effect. For example, one of the engineers in my team was given the objective of completing the delivery and commissioning of the wash water treatment system that supports Panther. We are in the process of working out how much water and hydrocarbon that will save us.”
“In a maintenance role we can set other objectives,” adds Tomkins. “In 2015 we had a five-hour response time to leaks. This year, the objective is that all compressed air leaks have to be addressed within four hours. This gives a measurable objective – you know when the request was logged and the job was finished – so it’s easy to see if the target has been reached. It is also, of course, easy to extrapolate this to find the energy saved by fixing it an hour earlier.”
Long-term approach
Of course, saving energy also leads to financial benefits. Electricity prices for manufacturers have risen by 22% in the past five years, and gas has increased by 11% in the same period, according to the latest government figures. “If you look at energy costs, they aren’t coming down,” explains Cox. “If we can make the buildings and equipment more efficient and save money that way, it leaves us with more cash to spend on developing new products and keeping our people employed. Ford only has a limited pot of money and the less we can spend on those incoming raw materials, the more we have to spend on researching the next generation of engine technology.”
From a global perspective, Dagenham is aiming high. “We are after Best-in-Ford levels of performance,” says Cox. However, while Panther is performing at that level, Cox concedes that “Dagenham as a whole won’t be able to reach them right now because of all the legacy lines it is still running.” Panther is running at a total of 92kWh of energy used per engine produced, which hits the global target for powertrain sites within Ford, and is well over half the 188kWh that the best lines at Ford were working at in 2011. But the team aren’t going to rest on their laurels: “We were set a five-year target and achieved it, but we aren’t just going to say ‘well done’ and go home,” says Cox. “We’re going to keep pushing ourselves with new targets. Look at the waste – even when you get to zero, you can still find a way of improving on it!”
An eco-friendly future
The future looks increasingly green for Dagenham: a fourth wind turbine is in the works, the plant is looking to replace its water treatment plant with recycling centres for water and hydrocarbons, and the company is looking to explore even more capabilities with MQL. The entire company has a clear environmental vision, which have come from the very top. “Our executive chairman, William Clay Ford Jr (great-grandson of Henry), is very strong on his environmental message,” says Cox. Indeed, Ford was named Best Global Green Brand in 2014 by Interbrand, and one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies by the Ethisphere Institute for a seventh year in a row earlier this year. It’s clear, then, that the company are doing something right.
