Charles E. Sorensen Quotes

The man who places a part does not fasten it. The man who puts in the bold does not out on the nut. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. Every piece of work in the shop moves. It may move on hooks, on overhead chains …. It may travel on a moving platform or go by gravity.

For much of Toyota's history, we have ensured the quality and reliability of our vehicles by placing a device called an andon cord on every production line - and empowering any team member to halt production if there's an assembly problem. Only when the problem is resolved does the line begin to move again.

Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are.

It never ceases to amaze me what it takes to develop and bring to mass production a product.

It was exactly an assembly line. You could look into infinity down these rows of drawing tables.

A laborer no longer makes whole articles. He receives raw materials, puts his touch on them, and passes them to another worker in the series. When the articles are quite finished they are carried out of sight by currents of commercial exchange. These currents are untraceable.

We dried continuously day and night. We had no efficient way to do it, so we built this new popcorn plant.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

The chips are in production, the machines aren't. So we've got a little bit of work left to do.

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

Now, I love a good factory tour. Drop me into a bottling plant, an automotive assembly line, or a jellybean factory, and I'm happy as a clam at high tide.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

Production is something I've never come to terms with.

Studios are an assembly line. They can be a very good assembly line. As a producer, you concentrate on one project at a time. As an executive, you're in charge of a slate.

I think that an industrial process is not like a rubber stamp. Everything has to be put together and, as such, should have its own expression.

With production alone as the goal, industry in North America was dominated by the assembly line, standardization for mass consumption.

In many respects, we really are trying to not run the Social Office like a business, but we do have a strategy. We do have a mission. We are trying to standardize certain things so that our time is not spent on, you know, picking flowers or linens, that we've got standards.

A big part of the Motown formula was, they took music and turned it into this sort of automotive assembly line. They were cranking out 10 songs a day in that studio, or more.

The Homestead plant, taken as a whole, is complete and finished in every department. There is nothing of any consequence to be desired. It is the first time I have ever been connected with any works that I could say it is finished and complete and to my entire satisfaction.

Economies of scale are a good thing. If we didn't have them, we'd still be living in tents and eating buffalo.

In the case of Apple, they did originally do production internally, but then along came unbelievably good outsourced manufacturing from companies like Foxconn. We don't have that in the rocket business. There's no Foxconn in the rocket business.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

I realized early on, maybe better than some of my competitors did, that a textile business can run only if you have scale. I decided to horizontally and vertically integrate, adding everything from spinning, dyeing, weaving, and stitching to processing and packing.

Now having said that, I realize that releasing a film in the real world is like trying to get General Motors to release a handmade car.