- Oct 6, 2006
- 12,153
- Boat Info
- 1996 450DA
- Engines
- 3116 Caterpillars
Since the people involved in this are long gone so I can share it with the owners of the wide body 370EC and the 340EC, both had extremely wide beams for 34-37 ft Sea Rays. at 14-2" and 13'0" respectively.
When those boats were in production I owned part interest in one of the largest engineering consulting firms in the sewn products industry. One quiet Monday the phone rings and it is a production manager from the Sea Ray factory in Knoxville. They had a production problem and asked us to send one of our best automated cutting engineers to Knoxville as soon as possible. Their problem was one we had developed a solution for so we pretty quickly implemented the fix and within a week had their cutter productivity issue solved by putting their automated cutter operators on an incentive pay plan.
While we were there our folks also noticed a production bottleneck………there were partially assembled hulls parked everywhere. The plant manager admitted that he knew the problem but management was reluctant to fix it. They were producing the 330EC with a 13 ft beam in a production area that only had 12' doors in it. They were reluctant to saw the concrete block walls to install 14' doors because of the concrete dust that would settle all over about 30 new wide beam hulls. The hang up was that adding new 14' doorswith electric operators was not in their capital budget……….We sent our guy to a nearby Home Depot and had him buy 15 rolls of polyethylene sheeting typically used for moisture barriers in homes. We told the plant manager that our services were not in their budget but to remove a production bottle neck management approved our project which we completed in less that the estimated time. We asked the plant manager to call his door contractor and tell him to start replacing the 12 ' doors with the new 14' doors the next morning. We covered all the 330EC hulls and tool boxes with plastic sheeting by about 8 pm and were ready for the door contractor by 7AM the next morning. We just included the cost of the polyethylene sheeting in our bill for the cutting project and everyone was happy.
An interesting side light to this story is that Sea Ray's business was booming in the sport boat/small cruiser segment and they needed the production space in Knoxville for sport boats/smaller cruisers and they moved the production of 330EC and the next seasons 340EC to the Merritt Island plant, a Sport Yacht factory in Florida.
