Day 10 included our fifth and final company visit to Horauf and Kohler, which is a plastics company. H&K mainly specializes in plastic parts for the interior of cars such as the dashboard, parts for the glove box, dials, etc. We also learned that a majority of their business comes from BMW and that their future isn’t necessarily the brightest. They’re phasing out a lot of the areas they’re currently in and they aren’t totally sure what the future holds for them. This made the visit very interesting and kind of awkward, especially for the group assigned to H&K.
Our factory tour started out with a slight bump in the road due to our tour guide being unable to speak English. This required a translator to accompany us on our tour and translate all remarks and questions, both to us in English and to the tour guide in German. The factory itself seemed very outdated and the whole organization of the factory was kind of scattered. I also noticed that the tools and molds used in the molding process seemed very old. As far as the workers at H&K go, I thought they seemed kind of uninterested and very lackadaisical. They didn’t really seemed invested in the work they were doing and there wasn’t a whole lot of camaraderie in the workplace like I noticed at Continental or SGL. There was also a room where older workers were hand-assembling parts. These workers had been at H&K for many years and were unable to do any heavy lifting or anything technical, so H&K kept them employed by giving them these jobs, even though its not economically smart.
Overall I wasn’t too impressed with H&K. It seems like they’re not doing many things to improve their company such as reduce costs or update their processes. 3-D printing is much less expensive and more efficient than the injection molding process they’re using now, but they seem reluctant to change this. I ultimately think that H&K’s reluctancy to keep up with the changing times and heavy reliance on BMW as their main customer will cause their downfall. After the company tour, we all met with our groups to finalize and finish our group presentations that we presented the following day.