German Engineering

So far on this trip, we've been lucky enough to be taken on two plant tours, at Audi and BMW. On both tours, we were with our professors who had previously worked within these plants, so we also had the opportunity to receive a bit more exclusive of a tour, which was very nice. These tours were directly related to the courses that we are currently taking, so it was very nice to see a lot of the concepts that we were discussing in lectures. It was also great to get out of the classroom and have real life examples.

Our first tour was at the Audi manufacturing plant in Ingolstadt, Germany, located about an hour and a half from Munich. I've been in a few manufacturing plants since I started engineering, and this was probably one of the most impressive that I've seen. The plant itself is incredibly large, as it houses several automobile production lines and several motor production lines. Not only is it large, but it is extremely clean for a production facility. There were ideas implemented within the facility that allow it to operate functionally, but also to clean at the same time. The most impressive thing to me though, was the amount of automation. I haven't been in a lot of facilities with this amount of automated work, but Audi blew me away with the sheer amount of robots that were performing work. Entire sections of the line can operate without any human interaction, and do nearly flawless work at every step. It was extremely impressive. Even amongst the areas that required manual work was there a lot of impressive engineering. Everything operates on a constant assembly line, so there is constant motion and constant work being performed. There is very little time wasted between process steps. As an industrial engineer, this plant made me very happy.

The second tour, at BMW, was right inside of Munich. The facility is located right near Olympic Park, which makes the entire area quite the sight to see. This plant was much more like what I'm used to seeing, a true manufacturing center. While there was still an impressive amount of automation, it had the feel (and smell) of a place where work was really done. Not that it was a disgusting amount of dirty, but it definitely looked like what I'd expected when we went to Audi. With a big land restriction, due to it being within the city, it was interesting to see BMW build their plant vertically. The body shop, where we toured, had four levels of manufacturing, with a level in between each dedicated to the conveyor belt system that carried parts throughout the facility. BMW was also a lot like Audi in that there was a lot of automated processes. In both facilities, welding and handling robots were most common. It was incredible to see these machines move and perform functions in seconds that might take an average worker a few minutes or even hours to perform.

The most interesting thing to me about BMW though was the flexibility of the facility. In the US, it's common for automotive manufacturers to shut down entire facilities to set up new manufacturing lines for their new products. In BMW, they had expansive sections dedicated to their stock/buffer system that could be converted to a new line whenever a new product was installed. During that time, they'd slowly ramp down production on old models, and ramp up production on new models until the line was able to be fully functional. After that, the old line would be taken down and the roles of the two areas would switch. It seems like a lot of unused space at times, but with the possibility of models changing yearly, it was a really impressive concept.