Manufacturing the Allison World Transmission

The purpose of this paper is to outline the manufacturing strategy for North American production of a third generation of heavy-duty automatic transmissions. This strategy consists of three key elements involving the product, the process for manufacturing the product and the people systems required to design, implement and continuously improve both the product and the process. Each of these elements must be balanced with the other two to provide a stable platform for the entire manufacturing enterprise. This is analogous to a three-legged milk stool as shown in Figure 1. Although there are linkages with the product design and people systems, the focus of this paper is the production process.