Fendt – AllAboutLean.com

(EN) A Visit to the Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim—Part 3

Dezember 2, 2025 von Christoph Roser

In this third and last post on the Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim, I will look in great detail at their digital dashboards as well as their excellent blue collar–driven continuous improvement process. I believe that true excellence can be achieved only through fast front-line improvement driven by the operators, and Fendt in Asbach-Bäumenheim is a good example of where it worked. As shown in my previous post, this plant has an outstanding performance, and the improvement system is the key driver for that. Read on!

(EN) A Visit to the Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim—Part 2

November 25, 2025November 25, 2025 von Christoph Roser

This is my second post on the excellent Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim, which impressed me a lot with their efficiency and general organization. In my last post, I looked at the plant and the line in general. In this post I will go deeper into the topic of efficiency, line balancing, and shop floor management. My last post will then look into their good digital dashboard as well as their blue collar–driven continuous improvement process. Read on!

(EN) A Visit to the Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim—Part 1

November 18, 2025November 18, 2025 von Christoph Roser

Recently, I had the chance to visit the Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim (between Stuttgart and Munich) thanks to an invite from Tarik Kadrispahić from Targer Consulting (Thank you, Tarik!). I’d previously had the chance to see their main plant in Marktoberdorf, and I liked it a lot. Hence, I entered their plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim with high expectations. And Fendt did not disappoint! In this first blog post of this series, I will look at the plant in general, and the details of the assembly line.

(EN) Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 3

Oktober 11, 2025April 2, 2024 von Christoph Roser

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.

(EN) Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 2

Oktober 11, 2025März 26, 2024 von Christoph Roser

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.

(EN) Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 1

Oktober 11, 2025März 19, 2024 von Christoph Roser

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.