Visualizing Monthly Production Metrics

[Brian Styles]

Monthly production visualized as a bar chart. The series includes:

1. The Ford San Jose (FSJ) build date, 
   
2. The Shelby American, Inc. (SAI) completed date
   
3. The date the car was shipped-off to the dealer (if applicable)
   
4. The quantity of unsold units that would be left in inventory for that month
   

Note: Car #0176 has been excluded from this data. Despite being assigned a Shelby VIN, #0176 was not ordered as a Shelby, and therefore including this car's dates in this and other research, tends to skew the statistics.

Once more Marti reports care collected, and we have a report for at least one car on each DSO, we could add the "Order Received Date" as another series to the chart.

[Brian Styles]

I've added a fourth series to visually show the build-up of inventory. 

It's easy to see that supply (production) was far-outpacing the demand (orders/shipped) of these cars. 

[Rich Plescia]

Hi Brian,

Thanks for posting this charts and for adding the SA inventory.

10% of the full production run is sitting around by the end of March.

20% is sitting by the end of April.

It shows a strong need to open up the dealer network beyond the franchised dealers to help move all those unsold/unordered units.

Rich

[Brian Styles]

Hey Rich,

Those were my initial observations as well, however, it would also be interesting to learn from an auto industry manufacturing professional if some of this 'inventory build-up' should have been planned.

i.e. manufacturer starts building cars a the end of the summer (start of fall). Winter should be the anticipated slow season. This is when many production-related problems should first be identified and corrected. Same goes for car Running Production Changes (RPCs). Then Spring and summer should be the ramped-up selling seasons, especially for performance-oriented cars. If the winter marketing is effective, the spring demand should be there and a proper inventory of ready-to-ship cars should be on-hand.

That said, in the case of Shelby American, I do see this inventory build-up as a big problem for the small company. Perhaps if Fred Goodell's interview statement (that Shelby didn't have to pay for the cars until after they were sold) is accurate, then this small company's problem effectively became the big company's problem....

By March, SAI is sitting on 230 unsold units, which means Ford probably hasn't been paid for 230 units. At $2500 per unit, that's $525,000 in accounts receivable on Ford's ledger. If Shelby was exercising a full net-30 on the previous month, that's another 96 units that Ford was waiting to get paid on....

And then everything seemed to change the following month... 

[Brian Styles]

Looking through the registry data, I've counted about ~ 386 cars that were listed as "inventory" units.

There following regional inventory cities were used referenced (first column). I've added the others to create this table:

PO Inventory	State	Nearest Big City	Zone	Sales Rep?
L.A. Dist	CA	Los Angeles	I	J. Camp (Torrance)
Pico Rivera	CA	Los Angeles	I	J. Camp (Torrance)
Atlanta	GA	Atlanta	V	J. Riddle (Atlanta)
Mahwah	NJ	NYC, Philadelphia	VI	E. Casey (Philadelphia)
Wixom	MI	Detroit	VII	D. Walsh (Allen Park)
Dearborn	MI	Detroit	VII	D. Walsh (Allen Park)

Only about 8 cars were listed as regional inventory with shipped dated before 4/10/1967. Almost all of them seem to be cars that were shipped to a dealer, returned, and then were sent off to inventory. The registry footnotes do not provide dates of each transfer, so I'm taking a guess at the sequence. It is logical that a "lemon" may get bounced around, finally repaired and then shipped off to a regional inventory lot. For those that would like to help, these cars include 0607, 0635, 0551, 0897, 0569, 1060, 1229, 0878.

The rest of the cars were all shipped on or after 4/10/1967. These regional inventory build-ups do seem to tie-in with the inventory build-up I've identified in the original post's bar chart, and they may even relate the mid-year Ford take-over and termination of the California Shelby Program that has been discussed in this post:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/shelbyresearch/vvHdD9CG4d0 

The Dearborn location didn't get added until much later.  A total of 20 units were shipped to the Dearborn inventory location; the first wasn't until 10/11/1967. Also, 13 or the last 15 inventory units were shipped to Dearborn (the other two were shipped to nearby Wixom). I wonder if the Dearborn location was actually A.O. Smith?

I'd expect that these regional inventory units would be light on options, and my quick calcs seem to support that theory. Of the 'inventory' units:

- Only ~6 of them had Air Conditioning

- Only ~10 of them had 'factory' AM radios (from San Jose)

[Brian S]

Adding to this thread, it is our belief that various Ford assembly plants were used for the Shelby Regional Inventory locations... 

Lots of space. Ford's running the show. Makes perfect sense.