Spare me the details

For those of you who are not interested in the logistics of the BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, your going to want to skip this post and move on to the next in which i plan on writing about the food.

BMW DAY 1

I signed a non disclosure agreement with BMW due to the fact that we saw the BMW X1 that has not yet been revealed to the public, so i will skip over that stuff. :P

Now for the good stuff. The BMW motor car company employs 100,000 people worldwide. 2500 of those are located in Leipzig, Germany. 7,000 of the 100g are strictly engineers. They made profits of 330 million Euro last year. That is a 4.3% loss from last year. They anticipate this coming year to do about the same in lost %. They produced 1.3 million cars and 100,000 motorbikes. The Leipzig plant has a capacity of 700-740 cars per day. They are currently running one shift at 400 cars per day. They make the BMW 1 series and 3 series. The production process consists of 240 steps from start to finish with a time of 38 hrs.

Now that i have told you the raw data, i will try my best to describe the plant. A tour of the building can be seen in my previous entry.
Please throw away your idea of a conventional Automobile plant, this plant is anything but conventional. I will also try to include pictures from their website since i was not allowed to take pictures.
Here is a list of things that i noticed were different:

1. NO forklifts whatsoever!! They used automated trolleys that are guided with magnets in the floor along with a building layout. As seen Below.
2. NO line changeovers!! They can produce the 1 series, then a 3 series, then a 1 series, etc. AND!!! they can produce right hand and left hand drive cars the same way. The firewall of the car has both right hand and left hand drive holes and slots. When it comes time to assemble the drive systems, the workers look at the screen, if its a right hand drive they assemble it on the right, and plug the wholes on the left. That was amazing!
3. There is 22 pounds of paint on a BMW. a zinc coating, primer, customer ordered paint, followed by an E-coat clear coat that is baked on.
   
4. A customer's order can be changed up to 11 days before the projected delivery date.
   
5. Automation is used just about everyplace possible. In order to get the correct parts on a vehicle, a transponder is placed on the hood where the BMW logo goes.
   
6. BMW spends 3 Billion Euro per year on Research and Development.
7. The car bodies flow through the office of BMW on an overhead conveyor. It was said that the CEO always wanted to remind the employees what they're working for. This can be seen on my video on the previous blog entry.
8. The welding robots had a griping arm as well as a spot welding on the same robot head. As you can kind of see in the picture below.
9. Exhaust Assembly: The semi is backed into a loading dock that is located within 5 ft of the cell. No inventory!

There are probably more, but i can't think of them at the moment. If i think of them, i will add them. We have two more days at BMW in the Agenda. One of them has the possibility of us driving on their test track.