Day 3 of the Plus3 Germany trip began with an early morning bus ride to Hoerbiger, an hour south of Augsburg.
The first factory, home to the Flow and Motion Control division, manufactured flow control chips used in ventilators, air compressors, vacuums, and oil and gas storage and transmission applications. This facility primarily manufactured the electronics for these applications, most of which were purchased from suppliers. However, the chips themselves were produced completely in-house, making the company their own supplier for their primary component. Each chip is tested and rated based on its capabilities in various environments, including temperature ranges and different loads and frequency of valve actuation. The process is almost entirely automated, with only a few employees on hand to transfer completed products from one station to another. Once complete, they are taken to the main electronics assembly area for integration.
The second facility, part of Hoerbiger’s Automotive Division, produced steel synchronizing rings for manual transmissions. This facility featured more traditionally industrial fabrication methods, including stamping, heat treating, vibration deburring, and coating with powdered material. With greatly simplified fabrication methods and high levels of automation, this product requires a small workforce to maintain, but there is more manual labor involved, though mostly in loading, unloading, and transporting parts from one machine to another.
Quality control is taken seriously in the Automotive Division, but not as much as the Flow and Motion Control division. The synchronizing rings are visually quality checked for fractures or imperfections, and any that don’t meet specification are discarded for further analysis. But in most cases, little comes of these these defects; most are sporadic errors, happening very infrequently. However, the Flow and Motion Control division is much more strict about quality control, most likely due to the cost associated with producing chips. The percentage of chips that pass QC is displayed at the entrance of the assembly area, color coded for the company’s level of satisfaction. If a chip fails QC, the workers try to run it through the tests again, hoping it passes. Otherwise, it is recycled and the failed components are discarded.
The business in the Flow and Motion Division is growing, especially with the high demand for ventilators for Covid patients and new growth in the oil and gas industry. However, the Automotive Division is looking to transition from producing synchronizing rings for internal combustion vehicles to producing similar components for electric vehicles, applying their vast expertise to fulfill the global automotive markets’ trends. They were aware that their product will eventually become obsolete and are in a position to shift to meet the needs of future automotive OEMs.
After the company tour, we travelled to Oberammergau, a small tourist town in the foothills of the Alps. After a half hour wait because of heavy rain (and even thunder), the group took a cable car to the top of the mountain above the town. The cable was nearly a mile long and allowed us to gain over a mile in elevation from the town below. From the lookout at the summit, you could see as far as Munich to the north, and nearly Austria to the south. The valleys spread out below, showing the stark contrast between the foothills and the mountains – a very abrupt change. After a photo session, we returned to Oberammergau for dinner and some shopping before returning to Augsburg.
