Rohr Corporation;

              Think your job is tough?
How would you like to run a plant and warehouse operation with about 30,000 work orders for small lot quantities in the works any one time, with some 75,000 part configurations, an average of 15 processing steps for each part, at least 95% of the parts made-to-order, and from 6,000 to 8,000 engineering changes a month?
Mix all of this together and you have the headache that Burt Raynes, president of Rohr Corporation, is con-fronted with on a daily basis. And he loves every minute of it.
Rohr Corporation, located in Chula Vista, California, is the world's largest supplier—among many other prod-ucts—of aircraft engine pods. What are aircraft engine pods? You've probably been looking at them for years without giving them a second thought or realizing that Rohr is the producer. The pod, viewed from the outside, is that sleek metal capsule covering the engine that you see when you look out at the wing. On the inside, it's approximately 5,000 wires, tubes, and other precision parts.
Most of the jet engine pods on Boeing, Lockheed, Douglas, Grumman and other top name aircraft are produced by Rohr. And if the operation outlined above sounds difficult or complicated, it's not. "Incredibly complex," the term used in a recent Business Week story about the company, is a more apt description.
Rohr's main manufacturing complex and corporate headquarters in Chula Vista, California.
Or, as one management observer puts it: "Rohr's problems of planning, scheduling, production control and followup, materials handling, storage, distribution and management in general are enough to stagger the imagination,"
Fortunately, however, they didn't stagger Burt Raynes's imagination. They stirred it up instead,
Raynes's personally designed Rx for complexity, says Business Week, is "what experts say is the most sophis-ticated warehouse ever devised."
Actually "Automove," the acronym for Raynes' brain-child, is much more than an automated warehouse. It is a computer-based total systems and communications network that takes the guesswork out of job-lot flow control and its myriad problems related to the dove-tailing of material, facility and resource logistics.
What does the system yield? The title of an article in Modern Materials Handling (February 1969) provides a capsule definition: "Doing the'Impossible'—Complete Control of Job-Shop Flow!"
Automove was first conceived by Raynes in 1965 and became operative in November 1967. One principal ob-jective was to upgrade factory performance on such products as engine pods, jet-engine power plants, and other key aircraft-structural assemblies. Another aim was to avoid the kind of runaway inventory problems that are generally confronted by complex operations in
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