BMW Plant Wins Automotive Lean Production Award
The 2022 ‘Automotive Lean Production Award in the OEM category has been awarded to Technology Assembly at the BMW Group site in Lower Bavaria, Germany. This makes the Dingolfing vehicle assembly one of the best plants in Europe at implementing lean production alongside digital innovation. This year, the prize is being awarded for the 16th time by trade magazine Automobil Produktion and the management consultancy Agamus Consult.
The deciding factor for the jury’s decision was the consistent implementation of BMW’s plan for its iFACTORY at the Dingolfing Technology Assembly. The BMW Group is using this strategy to orient its plants in their transition to e-mobility: BMW’s car production will, in the future, be lean, green and digital – in other words, efficient, sustainable and digitalized. The assembly at the BMW Group Plant Dingolfing is pursuing this aim to a T, with an “excellent interplay of lean and digital,” according to the jury. The plant’s ‘lean DNA’ was evident at every stage, the panel added. In their view, the Dingolfing vehicle assembly were making many small improvements from within –and were implementing these very quickly.
“The fact the Dingolfing Assembly has received this prestigious award impressively demonstrates that we are consistently implementing our BMW iFACTORY concept in our plants worldwide. For us, lean and digital always go hand in hand. We are using effective innovations to design our future production systems,” says Milan Nedeljković, Member of the Board of Management, Production, at BMW AG.
The jury for this industry award were particularly impressed by the many digital use cases being implemented in the Dingolfing Assembly. These included applications in the fields of data analytics, planning/line balancing of assembly staff, quality assurance, smart and predictive maintenance, operator support, automated driving in the plant environment, and virtual factory planning and commissioning – an “excellent mix of top-down and bottom-up approaches.”
The strong “interconnection of projects with the value stream” also played a major role in awarding the prize, according to jury member Werner Geiger, Managing Director of: “Many of the use cases encountered in assembly, with its approximately 5,200 employees, were piloted there or even developed in-house. The principles of the production system, which is oriented toward adding value, are supported in an exemplary manner – it isn’t a case of ‘technology for technology’s sake”. Despite the digitalization process, the focus is always on people.
Gunther Böhner, Director of Vehicle Assembly at the BMW Group Plant Dingolfing, is also delighted the site has won this top prize in this competition: “This accolade for our plant is an excellent way to acknowledge the dedication of our employees, who are doing the day-to-day work of bringing our BMW iFACTORY vision to life. They are ensuring our vehicle production plant in Dingolfing, which will soon celebrate its 50th birthday, continues to be an industry frontrunner of innovation and efficiency through constant evolution and optimization. It fills me with pride to think how fast our plant is converting the stimuli from the Munich head office into effective use cases.”
