Assembly Line | AllAboutLean.com

A Frequent Mistake—Undoing an Assembly Line—Part 2

Christoph Roser — Tue, 07 May 2024 11:00:58 +0000

Assembly lines are THE way to do mass production. Yet, with constant regularity people try out to undo the assembly line, only to fail in their endeavor. In my previous post I looked at examples by Volkswagen in Salzgitter, Volvo in Kalmar, and Opel in Bochum, who all tried, just to switch back to an ... Read more

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A Frequent Mistake—Undoing an Assembly Line—Part 1

Christoph Roser — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:44 +0000

Assembly lines are everywhere in mass production. From mobile phones to cars to airplanes, almost all items produced in large quantities come from an assembly line. Just look around you wherever you are and try to find a produced item that did NOT come from an assembly line. My general recommendation is that if you ... Read more

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The Evolution of Automotive Assembly Line—Part 2

Christoph Roser — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 11:00:15 +0000

In my previous post on the automotive assembly line I showed how the earliest chain-driven assembly lines evolved to modern moving platforms. However, in automotive assembly, you also need to work underneath the car. While I have seen truck assembly lines where the entire undercarriage is flipped on its back, in automotive, this is usually ... Read more

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The Evolution of Automotive Assembly Line—Part 1

Christoph Roser — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 11:00:47 +0000

Automotive assembly is one of the pinnacles of modern manufacturing, having a very complex product of 30 000 parts as well as mass production in large quantities. The modern automotive moving assembly line is hence one of the most complex manufacturing operations in the world. In this two-post series I will look at how this ... Read more

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The BMW Finger Line Layout

Christoph Roser — Tue, 09 Apr 2024 11:00:56 +0000

As part of my grand tour of German automotive, I visited the BMW plant in Leipzig. As of now, this is my second most favorite German automotive plant, after BMW in Munich. I will talk more about this quite well-organized and indeed beautiful plant in a later post series, but in this post I’m going ... 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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