Today we headed to GROB and was our last company visit for the trip. This was our only planned group event for the day and left the hotel and Augsburg around 8 AM. We arrived around 9 AM and were given a warm welcome to the private manufacturing company. They graciously gave us coffee, pretzels, and sandwiches which was an amazing start to the day as I missed breakfast and it really hit the spot. We were then given a nice intro presentation that highlighted a little of the company’s history and why they have been so successful. The company has and is still is private being owned by the GROB family and makes them unique out of the company visits and I think is why they seem so successful. During the lecture it highlighted how being private allowed them to switch to the production of EV producing machines almost a decade ago. They are also so successful that their products are used by Japanese car companies (like Toyota who invented lean manufacturing) which is something you rarely see. This gave me a strong starting opinion of the company well before we began the tour of the plants.

After the short presentation we began our tour and it was pretty remarkable. Every building we entered was very clean and had large amounts of extra space and everything looked very professional and efficient. The tour allowed me to visually better understand what the company manufactured, being machines that other companies used to manufacture their products. There were a wide range of these and something I thought really stuck out was that they invented a 3-D printer but used aluminum instead of plastic. Following the tour we were given a couple other lectures which were also really eye opening into the company. One was given by a former professor of Augsburg who worked on this program a couple of years ago, but switched jobs once they saw the company which I think speaks to how successful they are a whole. They are also the only company we toured that is growing and not shrinking which is rather impressive given Covid five years ago and the switch to EVs mandated by EU in the next decade. After an overall very impressive day we headed back to Augsburg and were given most of the afternoon free which was very nice.