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

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!

Digital Dashboards

I was very impressed with the organization and the efficiency of the plant. The second thing that impressed me were their digital dashboards. Nowadays, digital dashboards are a dime a dozen, and you can find them almost everywhere. Unfortuantely, most of these implementations are lacking, and often seem to hinder production more than help it (despite whatever management believes). Truly good implementations are few and far between (e.g., I liked the dashboards of LISI, an aerospace screw manufacturer in France, which I saw during our Van of Nerds in France.) But in general, I usually doubt a digital dashboard unless I am convinced otherwise.

Well, with Fendt I was convinced otherwise, and I believe that this is a very nice and well-done implementation of a digital shop floor dashboard, implemented around two years ago. As it is common for digital dashboards, there were plenty of touchscreen monitors all over the shop floor. Unusually, these were in portrait orientation rather than landscape. I found the portrait orientation quite easy to use, actually. This format also took up less floor space on the shop floor. The main measurements were safety, quality, and output.

Most of the displays made sense, and any click on the display yielded useful data in more detail on the current situation. Of course, I presume our guide probably clicked on the more useful parts of the digital dashboard, but I still liked what I saw (and there is no perfection in digital dashboards, but here the key parts are included and work well). This looked like a system that is well used and useful. Issues can be sent up and down the hierarchy with the press of a button.

In my experience, digital dashboards often lack because the programmers know programming but don’t understand the shop floor, and the shop floor knows the shop floor but does not understand programming. At Fendt, the digital dashboards were actually programmed by a former plant manager, who was both very good at lean manufacturing AND liked programming as a hobby. Hence, while the development still took two years, little was lost in translation, and he could adjust the software very well to the needs of the (Fendt) shop floor. This person has since left the company and set up his own business selling shop floor dashboards and the corresponding software, SFMevo (not to be confused with the digital dashboards by EVO solutions and the digital dashboards by SFM systems). Fendt believes that their digital dashboard solution is the best in the market, albeit it was initially kind of custom made for them. In any case, it is a tool for the people on the shop floor. As the system is working well, there were few paper print outs on the shop floor.

Continuous Improvement on the Shop Floor

Every plant does continuous improvement in some form. However, in my view, to become truly excellent, you need a LOT of improvement to create GOOD work standards. This works only if the people on the shop floor are the main drivers of improvement. And this does not mean merely an idea letter box for employees to drop their ideas. This works at Toyota, this works at BMW, and this works at Fendt Asbach-Bäumenheim. The overall goal is a 6% efficiency improvement every year.

Every team leader has to spend thirty minutes every day looking for waste (i.e., improvement potentials across the stations in his area of responsibility). These ideas and their eventual progress is also discussed daily during the shop floor meeting. Some improvements could be implemented quickly (“Open Points for Tomorrow”), others that took more time were only discussed weekly to avoid clogging the shop floor meeting with reviews of projects that do not change daily (“Open Long Term Points”). Overall, this creates fast and efficient improvement cycles, and I believe this is the reason that the plant performs so well. At the time of the visit, 1561 ideas were in the system, out of which 20 were completed and 200 started. The employees get a portion of the savings.

This change toward a blue collar–driven improvement process was not easy at Fendt. Before, like many other companies, they had group leaders responsible for a lot of people. These group leaders were swamped with organizational tasks and had little time for actual improvement. In 2016 they implemented another level of hierarchy below the group leader, the team leaders. These people are responsible for only a small section of the shop floor (around ten to twelve people), with a focus on supporting the operators and ensuring good-quality safety and productivity. They have no disciplinary role, but drive the improvement process. As such, this is very similar to Toyota’s team leaders. While the old way was to follow orders from above, the new way was for the operators and team leaders to improve their own workplace. They do also have a dedicated kaizen group, but these and their workshop are there only to support the front-line operators.

This concludes my series of three posts on the excellent Fendt Cabin Plant in Asbach-Bäumenheim. If you are interested into more on Fendt, I also have a three-post series of their main tractor plant in Marktoberdorf, where they use quite a few nice tricks to manage their huge variability. They call this system the “VarioTakt,” and—while not easy—it works quite well for them. But now, go out, bring the improvement process out of the kaizen department and into the shop floor, and organize your industry!

PS: Many thanks to Tarik Kadrispahić from Targer Targer Engineering & Consulting for inviting me to come along on his excellent tour of Fendt and other plants!