Even assembly lines are used frequently by the capitalism the amount of literature about the subject is small. To understand the situation better we have to go back to the time before the first conveyor belt was invented. What human societies are trying to achieve is to produce goods. For example, food and household products. Before somebody can eat bread it has to be produced first.
The main bottleneck in production goods is the low productivity. It takes cost and amount of time until a product is ready. For example, if somebody tries to create a bread in the home kitchen he will need some hours until the bread is ready to consume. The amount of invested time and money has influence to the cost how the product is sold.
The assembly line is a way to improve the productivity. The idea is that at least the transportation of products from one station to another is fully automatized by the conveyor belt. And the task at each station is performed by human labor. In a more advanced setup mechanical machines are used as workstations so that the amount of human labor is reduced further.
What all studies for assembly lines have shown is, that the principle works remarkable well. It is some sort miracle to compare assembly line factories with their manual counterpart. The advantage for the assembly line is huge.
Especially for producing mass products the principle is the best known technique today. It helps to reduce the costs for a single product drastically. And perhaps this advantage is the main reason why the assembly line is described seldom in the literature. It works too good to be true. That means companies how are using the technique are able to increase their productictity drastically and the amount of production is endless. The assembly line has generated the paradox situation that valuable products are no longer limited but they can be produced in endless amount of quantities. The same factory can produce 100 units per day or it can produce 10k units per day. And no further costs will be there.
Basically spoken a well maintained assembly line can create products out of nothing, similar to what a magician is doing. Assembly lines are improved further with the introduction of robots. The transportation from goods between the workstations was automated since the beginning, but in the past, human workers were needed for eacht workstation. A robot can automate the remaining workforce so at the end, no humans at all are needed. This is not wishful thinking but it is the reality.
Let us try to understand what the consequence is. The consequence is, the production costs for mass products can become zero or nearly zero. This sounds great for the customer but it can produce negative results for the economy in general. The capitalism is great in managing limited resources, but if the goods are provided for free the idea of capitalism is no longer working. Basically spoken, the fully automated assembly line is a positive and a negative thing at the same time. It has revolutionized the capitalism in the 19th century but it will make the capitalism obsolete in the future.
From a technical perspective a factory is doing two things. First thing is to transport goods between the workstations. That means, at workstation 1 the bread is created and at workstation 2 it gets packaged. The distance in between has to be traveled for all the breads. Somebody may argue, that it is not very complicated to take a bread with a weight of 500g and transport it 500 meter to the next workstation. Sure, for a single unit this is true, but what will happen if the same action has to be done 1000 times? Then it is a large scale logistics problem. And exactly this problem is solved by a conveyor. A conveyor is an automated logistics machine which works 24/7 without any human labor. The only thing what is needed is electric current and the conveyor will transport thousands of raw products.
The second task which is done in a factory is to handle an item at the workstation. For example to put a bread into a box. Automating this task with machines is more complicated. Some mechanical machines are available but most of the work is done by humans. So we can say that a workstation is the weak point of an assembly line. If the humans are working slow, the conveyor speed is limited. From a technical perspective a single workstation can be automated with a robot. A typical example is a pick&place robot who is packaging the bread into a box by itself. No humans are needed but the operation works autonomously. Such kind of production line is the most advanced technology available. The output per minute is high and the overall costs are low.
The main advantage is, that such a system is used for mass production. It can create easily many bread in an hour and this is what today's and future companies are doing.
Production lines and robots have some of inner logic which is realized in any case. The main principle is to increase the productivity. All converyors and all robots are created with the goal to do so. That means, the though output is high, the costs are low and the benefit for the owner of such a machine is high. The reason is that technology is used to solve problem. The problem in capitalism is how to produce goods. There is need to create a certain amount of bread, and the bread factory is doing so. It doesn't make sense to invent a conveyor who runs slowly or build a robot who is making mistakes. These potential errors are fixed easily and at the end the machine is running with maximum productivity.
Conveyor
At foremost a conveyor is a technical innovation. It consists of an electric motor plus a tape. After activating the machine it will transport the items. Even the principle looks not very advanced it can be used everywhere. Especially for cases in which a high amount of units has to be transported the conveyor is a here to stay principle. It is superior over human powered transport vehicles and it outperforms even a car or a truck. for lower distances.
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