Using bucket brigades to migrate from craft manufacturing to assembly lines

One way to organize workers that lies between traditional assembly lines, where workers are specialists, and craft assembly, where workers are generalists, are “bucket brigades”. We describe how one firm used bucket brigades as an intermediate strategy to migrate from craft assembly to assembly lines. The adoption of bucket brigades led to a narrowing of tasks for each worker and thus accelerated learning. The increased production more than compensated for the time lost when workers walk back to get more work, which was significant in this implementation. To understand the trade-offs in migrating from craft to assembly lines, we extend the standard model of bucket brigades to capture hand-off and walk-back times.