The second BMW plant I visited was in Leipzig. This modern greenfield plant had a very good material flow, where especially the finger line impressed me a lot. In terms of efficiency it was the best-performing plant in Germany, shortly after Munich, and on par with Toyota. It was also exceptionally clean. The only flaw I saw was that they have the order to never stop the line… which goes against my lean philosophy. But read on.
The Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, or short BMW, is a maker of luxury vehicles, sport cars, and motorcycles. As part of my Grand Tour of German Automotive I visited their plants in Munich and Leipzig, and was quite impressed. In my view, it these are the best-performing automotive plants in Germany, and close to the performance of Toyota in Japan. I also visited their motorbike plant in Berlin, which was a bit different. Let me show you what I saw, starting with Munich.
In 2017-18, I had the chance to visit factories of all seven Japanese car makers as part of my Grand Tour of Japanese Automotive. In the last few weeks, I had the chance to repeat this for Germany and do a Grand Tour of German Automotive. Let me show you what I saw and what I learned from visiting fifteen vehicle assembly plants all over Germany!
This is the third post in my series on how Fendt handles its rather large variability. As mentioned before, all of their tractors—eleven different models with countless variants—come from the same assembly line in Marktoberdorf. This includes small tractors that are just barely one meter wide and huge ones as you see here on the left. Imagine assembling motor bikes, cars, and trucks on the same assembly line, and you are getting close to the variability that Fendt has to deal with. Overall, this makes Fendt in my view one of the leading plants in the world in handling variability.
In my previous post I started to show you how Fendt uses the distance between tractors on their assembly line to manage their quite high variability. By changing the distance between parts on the line, you can adjust the takt time for each part on the assembly line, hence the name Variable Takt. But this still leaves a lot of variability, as not all stations will have the same identical workload. In this and the next post I will go deeper into how Fendt manages its variability. This will be good, since Fendt is one of the benchmark plants in the world in handling variability.
In this post I will look at how the tractor maker Fendt handles variability in its plant in Marktoberdorf, Germany. In my view, Fendt is one of the benchmark plants in the world in handling variability. In my previous post I looked at reasons why you may (or may not) leave one part empty on an assembly line with a part normally at every fixed interval. In this post I would like to expand on the idea of playing with the distance between parts to handle such variations in the cycle time, but with a focus on assembly lines where the interval between products can vary. We will look at how Fendt uses this to wrangle its variability.