Where no bus stops: at age 88, the world's largest builder of school buses keeps learning lessons.

• Position: PICTURE THIS - Thomas Built Buses Inc.

They're still painting them yellow, though not much else is the same at the world's largest school-bus manufacturer. Founded in High Point in 1916 as a streetcar maker, Thomas Built Buses Inc. has been making buses since 1936. But it doesn't let tradition stall innovation. "We've got a lot of new ideas at work here," President John O'Leary says.

A $39.7 million plant the company opened in August showcases the new ideas, part of what's being termed lean manufacturing. Parts arrive from suppliers only as needed, and trucks deliver them to loading docks near the spot on the assembly line where they'll be used, eliminating warehouses and inventories. The factory's first project is a sleek--for a bus--new model called the Thomas Built Saf-T-Liner C2.

At the showplace plant, lean manufacturing can be seen as well as heard. Or not heard. It's not pin-drop quiet, but it's quieter than the din of most plants that work with sheet metal and cold steel. The crackle of arc welders, the buzz of spot welders and the whirring of motors that drive the 275,000-square-foot plant's slow, three-quarter-mile long assembly line are subdued.

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The plant is designed specifically to build the C2, which uses a chassis assembled at a Freightliner LLC truck plant in South Carolina. Freightliner purchased Thomas Built in 1998. "A lot of noise once was from the pneumatic tools used in chassis construction," O'Leary says.

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"Plus, we have gone to widespread use of adhesives, which eliminates a lot of riveting and grinding." The adhesives join body panels. The engineering school...