On July 7, 2008, Volkswagen announced its intention to build a new assembly plant in Hixson, TN, a suburb of Chattanooga. A big assembly plant. A really big assembly plant—three interconnected buildings with 1.9 million square feet under roof. Of the 650 acres on the site not occupied by structures, 240 acres will be made into parking lots. The total investment is estimated at $1 billion and the facility is expected to create 2,000 jobs. Initial production will be about 150,000 cars per year with full production running about 200,000 cars per year. As with any such project, the goal was to get from site announcement to fully operational in as little time as possible so that VW could start production and get some value from its commitment.
Once site selection had been determined, the next step was site prep. The scope of that challenge is revealed with some simple math: 5.5 million cubic yards of material divided by 110 days equals 50,000 cubic yards per day. That’s what Wright Brothers Construction Co. Inc. of Charleston, TN, was up against. And it wasn’t just a matter of volume. The company wasn’t merely pushing millions of cubic yards of dirt over a cliff. No, the resulting area had to be finished to spec. Tolerances were plus or minus 0.25 inches for the building sites and plus or minus 0.5 inches for the parking areas.
When information was gathered for this article, two weeks before the deadline, Wright Brothers was slightly ahead of schedule for the building pads and right on schedule with the overall grading. That’s impressive. More impressive was the fact that the company was beating specs. “In the areas where we’ve used millimeter GPS systems, we’ve held accuracy to one one-hundredth of an inch,” said David “Hootie” Houghton, the engineer in charge of GPS and surveying for Wright Brothers. That’s 25 times tighter than the company’s most demanding spec.
Keys to Success
How did Wright Brothers accomplish this feat? First, the company came with plenty of experience from similar jobs, including the Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire plant in Warren County, TN; the Boeing facility for the manufacture of the Delta IV launch vehicle in Decatur, AL; and the General Mills warehouse in Chattanooga. Second, the timing was right and Wright Brothers was able to bring 70% of its fleet of equipment to this job.
Third, and perhaps most important, Wright Brothers had extensive experience with Topcon Positioning Products technology, including working on five projects using millimeter GPS (mmGPS) in the three years preceding this project. At the Volkswagen site, the company had nine dozers, eight excavators, and a grader equipped with Topcon products. Two of the excavators and one dozer were sporting new 3D machine-control systems bought for this job.
Wright Brothers enjoyed three huge advantages from its extensive use of machine-control systems. First, the learning curve was shallow. “New operators can run our Topcon-equipped machines in a matter of minutes and be cutting grade within a few hours,” said Houghton.
Even seasoned operators found the systems easy to use. Tim Bingham had 22 years in the industry before joining Wright Brothers three days before he was interviewed for this article. Bingham spent more than eight of those 22 years in Florida as a supervisor for a company that used another line of positioning products. “If I’d known then what I know now,” he said, “we would have never used anything but Topcon equipment. It’s so easy to learn and easy to use, yet it has all the features we need.” Bingham was walking the site with a Topcon rover. Wright Brothers used rovers to log its volume to prepare weekly billing, which was submitted on Saturday or Sunday.
Beyond Ease-of-Use
The second advantage was that there were significant time-savings because the first pass was to grade. “There’s no need for rough grading prior to bluetopping,” Houghton continued. “Our first cut-and-fill brought us to the finished grade.” This was true not only with dozers and graders, but also with Topcon-equipped excavators.
Additional time-savings came from the fact that no stakes were needed for grading. “With nearly 200 pieces of equipment on this site, stakes would not have lasted long,” said Houghton. “We’d have been replacing some percentage of them every day. In addition, we got minor changes every few days and major changes every week to 10 days. With the Topcon Pocket 3D, we loaded the changes and everything was immediately updated instead of resetting 500 to 1,000 stakes every time. Going stakeless saved about 40% of a foreman’s time.”
The third advantage Wright Brothers enjoyed as a result of its proficiency with GPS and machine control was that of production capacity. “Our volume was twice as much as our nearest competitor,” said Houghton, “and that played a big part in landing the job.” Even with the high-volume capability, Wright Brothers worked 12-hour days, six days a week.
Wright Brothers Construction was brought in as a subcontractor to East Tennessee Grading Inc. of Chattanooga to help with moving material and laying the base stone. East Tennessee was the prime contractor. “We’re under contract to do all the site work required by the city, county, and state,” said East Tennessee vice president Tony Boals. “Our agreement is with Hamilton County [TN].”
Boals said his company also relies heavily on Topcon equipment. “We’ve been using their products for four or five years,” he said. “We have millimeter GPS systems on two graders and a D8 dozer. We also have three rovers.” While conventional wisdom says that younger operators are more willing to embrace new technology than seasoned veterans, Boals said his young operators are often the ones who want hubs, stakes, and stringlines. Once these operators learn to trust the technology, however, their fears go away and they become completely accepting of—even dependent upon—the electronics. “We have a joke in our company that if our batteries fail we have to shut down,” said Boals.
Not all the Topcon equipment at the Volkswagen site was the latest and greatest. Although survey firm Barge, Waggoner, Sumner & Cannon Inc. (BWSC) of Knoxville makes extensive use of GPS systems, 3D scanners, and other cutting-edge technology, company employee David Frank was on site using a 9-year old Topcon GPT 1002 total station. Frank said that he was pleased with the performance of his relative relic. “I like it because it will pick out objects through trees and brush,” he said. “If I can get something on the prism, this thing will shoot it.” Gary Clark, vice president in charge of surveying at BWSC, said, “We believe in using the right equipment for each job. That total station, as old as it is, still has value for some applications. As long as that remains true, we’ll keep using it to free up our other, more technologically advanced equipment for more demanding tasks.”
Both East Tennessee and Wright Brothers are serviced by the Knoxville location of Roper Laser, a Topcon dealer.
Timing Is Everything
In late 2007, Volkswagen announced plans to dramatically increase its market share in North America and globally, and the Hixson plant will fit right into those plans. The plant is to be completed in 2010 and production to begin in 2011. The timing should be just right to capitalize on an expected rebound in demand for autos. Ironically, demand entered a severe slump just as the VW plant was getting started. For example, at that time Nissan North America announced plans to scale back production at their two US plants in Smyrna, TN, and Canton, AL, due to sluggish demand.
Auto plants weren’t the only ones being battered at the time the new VW plant was being developed. Shaw Industries Group Inc. decided to shutter its Plant 76 in Trenton, GA, which had produced spun yarn for carpet production. Trenton is about 30 miles southwest of Hixson. With 440 jobs, Plant 76 had been Trenton and Dade County’s largest employer. Those displaced workers entered the labor pool from which VW would draw its workers. Trenton officials, meanwhile, worked on plans to market their community to automotive suppliers.
The opportunity provided by the Volkswagen development includes more than an assembly plant. The company’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, Germany, boasts the Autostadt (“Car City” in German), described in the Chattanooga Times Free Press as “a combination theme park, welcome center, and modern work station.” On display at the Autostadt are 40 brands of automobiles from the company’s stables, including VW, Bentley, and Lamborghini. While VW had not revealed plans for the Hixson version of the Autostadt, it would surely be less grand than its German cousin. Even so, the center will provide opportunity beyond the factory itself.
Volkswagen was equally reluctant to provide details for a planned test track at the assembly plant beyond confirming that a track would be built and that it would be a low-speed facility. “Low speed” is a relative term, however. By comparison, Volkswagen’s Ehra-Lessien test track, one of three near the firm’s headquarters in Wolfsburg, allows vehicle speeds up to 250 miles per hour. The Hixson track will be more like the one inside the Wolfsburg facility, where speeds are limited to 85 miles per hour. VW already has a test track in the US near Phoenix, AZ.
Much More Than Beetles
Volkswagen’s lineup has expanded dramatically from its humble, one-model beginnings of more than 70 years ago. Volkswagen is now the third-largest car manufacturer in the world; only Toyota and GM produce more units. VW offers 14 models in the North American market alone. The midsize sedan to be built at the Hixson plant will be a new model for this market. Although the design is supposed to be complete already, VW has tightly guarded any information except to say that the new car will be roughly the size of the company’s Passat model. Even the model name is being withheld. What’s not a secret is Volkswagen’s desire to build market share. The company’s goal is to sell 8 million vehicles by 2011, which would be an increase of nearly 30% over its 2007 unit sales numbers.
The Hixson campus will play a key role in that growth, which is good news in an area battered by heavy job losses in the traditional manufacturing, textiles, and home furnishings industries. The arrival of a global automotive giant and the constellation of second- and third-tier suppliers that will support it represents a tectonic shift in the local economy. It’s a shift that starts with moving dirt—lots of dirt in a short time.