Happy 11th Birthday, AllAboutLean.com!

Yet another year has passed, and AllAboutLean.com is now eleven years old! Every year I am surprised that I again managed to write and publish 52 blog posts, one for every week. And, by writing I mean actually writing, not just AI-generated text garbage. This is now the 579th post on this site! Since day one my goal has been to spread knowledge of lean, and based on the success of AllAboutLean.com, it seems to be working :).

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Volkswagen Emden

VW Emden Aerial PhotoThe VW plant in Emden is a well run plant, and among the best in the Volkswagen group. It is also producing only fully electric battery powered vehicles… which are not selling well. This leads to a lot of struggles and problems for the plant. Producing only one type of power train makes production more efficient but less flexible. And Emden is paying the price for this lack of flexibility. Other car makers usually opt to produce all kinds of power trains on the same assembly line. But the organization and lean-ness of the plant was good compared to other German car plants. Let’s have a look.

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Volkswagen Wolfsburg

VW Wolfsburg Power PlantVolkswagen is one of the largest car makers in the world, and the largest German car maker. The Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg is by far the largest German automotive plant. However, in terms of lean performance, it is merely mediocre. On the other hand, it is not easy to run a production in protected historic buildings. Lets go and have a look at the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg…

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Audi Neckarsulm

Audi Neckarsulm Aerial
Audi Neckarsulm

As part of my Grand Tour of German Automotive, I visited the two Audi plants in Germany, the headquarters in Ingolstadt and the second plant in Neckarsulm. In my last post I showed you Ingolstadt, in this post you will see Neckarsulm, which makes (among other things) the ultra-luxurious Audi A8 and its variants. Both plants are interesting, albeit for me the Neckarsulm plant performs and feels a bit better. Read on!

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Porsche Assembly Lines

Porsche Museum Zuffenhausen
Porsche Museum Zuffenhausen

In my previous post I looked at Porsche and the Porsche plants in Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart and the plant in Leipzig. In this post I will go deeper and look at three final assembly lines in these two plants. In Zuffenhausen I visited two final assembly lines, the 911 and 718, as well as the fully electric Taycan assembly line. In Leipzig, they have only one assembly line where they produce the Panamera and the Macan. Let’s go through them from the oldest (forty-year-old line for the 911 Zuffenhausen) to the intermediate (twenty-year-old line in Leipzig) to the latest (five-year old line for the Taycan in Zuffenhausen). Let’s go!

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Porsche Overview

Porsche is part of the Volkswagen group. Yet, this luxury sports car maker maintained its own style and the shop floor feels (and performs) different from the Volkswagen group. In this blog post, I will look deeper into the main plant in Zuffenhausen and the second manufacturing location in Germany, Leipzig. The next blog post looks in detail at three Porsche assembly lines, from the oldest to the newest. The oldest is the forty-year-old 911 & 718 Cayman line in Zuffenhausen; then the twenty-year-old line for the Panamera and Macan in Leipzig; and finally the line for the electric Taycan in Zuffenhausen from 2020.

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Daimler Truck Wörth

Daimler Wörth Aerial Photo
Mercedes-Benz Wörth aerial photo

The last plant of my visits to Mercedes-Benz  as part of my Grand Tour of German Automotive, was not a car plant, but the world’s largest heavy-duty truck plant, in Wörth (albeit it is technically a separate company, not Mercedes-Benz but Daimler Truck). Seeing three parallel heavy-duty truck assembly lines popping out a truck every minute is quite impressive. And it is one of the few instances where they actually use an Exoskeleton for work rather than merely to impress others. Read on!

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