Information About ™Factory |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT FACTORY | |
| industrial revolution | |
| manufacturing | |
| production and manufacturing | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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A factory (previously '''manufactory''') or '''manufacturing plant''' is a large Industrial Building where workers Manufacture Good s or supervise Machine s Process ing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or Warehouse -like facilities that contain heavy Equipment used for Assembly Line production. Archetypally , factories gather and concentrate resources — Worker s, Capital and Plant . WORD USAGE Before becoming associated with large-scale manufacturing, the term ''factory'' might refer to:
The Oxford English Dictionary traces the use of ''factory'' as a manufacturing site, ''plant'' or ''works'' back as far as 1618 . HISTORY OF THE FACTORY The Venice Arsenal provides the first example of a factory in the modern sense of the word. Founded in 1104 in Venice , Italy , several hundred years before the Industrial Revolution , it Mass-produced ships on Assembly Line s using Manufactured Parts . The Venice Arsenal apparently produced nearly one ship every day and, at its height, employed 16,000 people. Apart from that, many historians regard Matthew Boulton 's Soho Manufactory (established in 1761 in Birmingham ) as the first modern factory. (Other claims might be made for John Lombe 's Silk Mill in Derby ( 1721 ), or Richard Arkwright 's Cromford Mill ( 1771 )—purpose built to fit the equipment it held and taking the material through the various manufacturing processes.) British colonies in the late 18th Century built factories simply as buildings where a large number of workers gathered to perform hand labor, usually in Textile production. This proved more efficient – for Administration and for the distribution of raw materials to individual workers – than earlier methods of manufacturing such as Cottage Industries or the putting-out system. Cotton Mill s used inventions such as the Steam Engine and the Power Loom to pioneer the industrial factory of the 19th Century , where precision Machine Tool s and replaceable parts allowed greater Efficiency and less waste. Henry Ford further revolutionized the factory concept in the early 20th Century , with the innovation of Mass Production . Highly specialized workers situated alongside a series of rolling ramps would build up a product such as (in Ford's case) an Automobile . This concept dramatically decreased production costs for virtually all manufactured goods and brought about the age of Consumerism . In the mid- to late 20th century, industrialized countries introduced next-generation factories with two improvements: # Advanced Statistical methods of Quality Control , pioneered by the American mathematician William Edwards Deming , whom his home country initially ignored. Quality control turned Japanese factories into world leaders in Cost-effectiveness and production quality. # Industrial Robot s on the factory floor, introduced in the late 1970s . These computer-controlled welding arms and grippers could perform simple tasks such as attaching a car door quickly and flawlessly 24 hours a day. This too cut costs and improved speed. Some speculation as to the future of the factory includes scenarios with Rapid Prototyping , Nanotechnology , and Orbit al zero- Gravity facilities. SITING THE FACTORY Before the advent of , founded in a rural setting, developed its own housing and profitted from convenient communications networks. Regulation curbed some of the worst excesses of Industrialisation 's factory-based society, a series of Factory Act s leading the way in Britain. Tram s, automobiles and Town Planning encouraged the separate development ('apartheid') of industrial suburbs and residential suburbs, with workers commuting between them. Though factories dominated the Industrial Era, the growth in the s. The next blow to the traditional factories came from Globalisation . Manufacturing processes (or their logical successors, Assembly plants) in the late 20th century re-focussed in many instances on Special Economic Zone s in developing countries or on Maquiladora s just across the national boundaries of industrialised states. Further re-location to the least industrialised nations appears possible as the benefits of Out-sourcing and the lessons of flexible location apply in the future. GOVERNING THE FACTORY Much of Management theory developed in response to the need to control factory processes. Assumption of the hierarchies of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled workers and their supervisors and managers linger on. SEE ALSO
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