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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen

Christoph Roser — Tue, 25 Jun 2024 11:00:43 +0000

My Grand Tour of German Automotive continues now with plants from Mercedes-Benz (also known as Daimler). I visited a total of four plants from Mercedes-Benz, including all three automotive final assembly plants Sindelfingen, Bremen, and Rastatt. I also had a tour at their quite good Daimler truck plant in Wörth, the largest heavy-duty truck plant ... Read more

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—BMW Berlin Motorbikes

Christoph Roser — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 11:00:03 +0000

The last plant of BMW I visited in Germany was in Spandau, Berlin. This was different from BMW Munich and Leipzig. For one, it makes motorbikes, not cars. But its performance was also not as stellar as the best of (German) benchmark plants Leipzig and Munich. But despite some issues, it still performed on an ... Read more

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—BMW Leipzig

Christoph Roser — Tue, 11 Jun 2024 11:00:03 +0000

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 ... Read more

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—BMW Munich

Christoph Roser — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 11:00:33 +0000

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 ... Read more

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The Grand Tour of German Automotive—Overview

Christoph Roser — Tue, 28 May 2024 11:00:43 +0000

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 ... Read more

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Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 3

Christoph Roser — Tue, 02 Apr 2024 11:00:25 +0000

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 ... Read more

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Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 2

Christoph Roser — Tue, 26 Mar 2024 11:00:10 +0000

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 ... Read more

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Variable Takt at Fendt in Marktoberdorf—Part 1

Christoph Roser — Tue, 19 Mar 2024 11:00:38 +0000

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 ... Read more

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