Today was the big day for the Audi visit in Inglostadt. As usual, I slept on the bus to the way there to try and gain some sleep. When we got to Audi, I was surprised at how large the campus was. They had a fitness center, a restaurant, museums, and, of course, the huge factories where the cars were actually made. I was excited for this trip but I had no idea how cool it actually would be.
For the first part of the visit, we were given an introduction to Audi, what they stand for, and where they strive to go in the future. The presentation was interesting, but typical of a company whose goal is to sell themselves to the viewer. The truly amazing part came when we began the factory tour and saw the actual facilities. In the factories at this campus, they produce the models Q2, A3, A4, and A5. The area is so big that we had to take a bus ride across the campus to reach the first part of the factory.
I was instantly amazed when we entered the factory (sorry no pictures allowed!). The first thing you notice are the huge robot arms working on various car parts. The arms work very smoothly, moving huge chunks of metal from one place to another to turn them into a car. The arms also had the ability to weld pieces together, attach components, and realign them. While many processes in the factory are autonomous, there are workers there who monitor the machines and make sure everything runs smoothly. These workers work alongside with the robots. There are also screens at the top of the factory that display how much is being produced and how close they are for the daily target production. If they do not meet the daily goal, the workers will have to stay longer until they do. You cannot speed up the production process because of how optimized it already is. They also monitor which machines are correctly working through a red, yellow, and green light system above the machines, much like the other factories that we saw. When one machine isn’t working correctly, a worker will come over to assess the issue and correct it.
My impression of this factory versus the others was that Audi was much more clean and organized than the others. They did not have the autonomous robots that would transport materials from place to place like Continental did, but they had the amazing robot arms that functioned with precision and power. One thing that I found really interesting was the lunch break for the workers. Yes, I know that sounds lame, but it is most likely an industrial engineer who structures the lunch timing for employees to optimize the line process. This factory had it where everyone went on lunch together at once and most of the robots were stopped during this time. However, there was one part of the line that remained on and processed the car parts. From my prior knowledge, I assume that this was the “bottleneck” of the entire system. Basically, the other process times don’t really matter because they are all faster than this process. So whatever the non-bottleneck processes do just creates extra inventory (which costs money to hold) so you do not want these running all the time. However, the bottleneck directly dictates the throughput of the system because it is the slowest process. Therefore if the bottleneck stops running, the plant loses money. That is why they left it to run while the workers went on break. It was great to see this practice in action instead of just reading about it in a book.
After seeing the incredible factory processes, we got lunch and then toured the museum. For lunch today, I got schnitzel. I thought it was very good and really enjoyed it. The museum, to me, was personally underwhelming. I enjoy the process of making the cars more than the cars themselves, as you can see from the previous paragraph. So just looking at cars does not really appeal to me. These pictures show the two types of extremes that were on display. It’s interesting to see how much has changed!
Finally, we were given another presentation on Audi and what their future plans are. They truly believe that electric cars are the future and are preparing for this big change. They also want to target the progressive and premium market. They believe that by doing this, they will experience a “spill over” effect where people in other groups will also purchase their car because of its status. For dinner, I went back to the pub with some friends. I mean, the food is just too good to pass up on. I just wish that there was more plain water readily available here, then it would be perfect!