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Getting lines up and running quickly in new territories can be hard. More modular production systems could be the solution. By John Pullin

Building a car plant is a complex decision, and the complexity within car plants themselves means that everything can take a long time. Contrast that with the speed with which new models are these days developed, and there is something of a mismatch.

Now German-owned automation and painting plant specialist Dürr is trying to get past some of the delays by cutting down on the complexities. The result? Well, Dürr says, Ford was going to take a whole weekend to commission a new pilot plant for product variations at its Köln plant last month. Audi took longer – three-and-a-half months – to get a line with 18 separate workstations designed and then up and running at Neckarsulm.

And these stats aren’t just available to companies in “experienced” carmaking locations. A “small loop” at BMW’s new complete knock-down (CKD) plant in India went from the drawing board to completion in three months. Russian group Severstal, which knows a lot about steel but hasn’t built cars before, is using some of the same ideas.

“Even in high wage areas of the world it sometimes makes sense to reduce the complexity of installations,” says Dirk Gorges, senior vice-president in charge of factory assembly systems.

But the real target for Dürr’s ideas is revealed when he mentions that, the day before the press were let loose on the group’s facilities in Stuttgart, a large party of Russians had had the VIP treatment. They were, Gorges says, “very interested”.
What Dürr has to show them is a set of hardware and software modules that come together to make an automotive assembly line that can be as big and as automated as the customer wants.

There are standard structural elements, conveyor systems, sorting stations, power lines and places where people or robots can work. The whole idea is called Fastplant, with the first three letters standing for Flexible Assembly Systems.

The clever bit behind this modular system comes in the configuration design, where Dürr uses CAD and simulation techniques to model not just the facilities of a new plant, but also the product flow through it. Gorges hesitates about calling it a “digital factory”, but that in essence is what it is: and the glitziest part is a “power wall” walk-through simulation.

It’s not just for show, though. “We can see the whole plant and we can simulate any possible problems in it,” Gorges says. Where automakers want to put different models or colour batches down a line, you can simulate the effects of an out-of-sequence action or find the bottlenecks. “There are also benefits in training staff such as maintenance people in advance,” he adds.

The simulations of assembly systems, Dürr reckons, are more than 98 per cent accurate and they allow questions to be asked early on in the design process. “The problem with optimising your factory when it’s running is that you’ve got to stop the factory to achieve it,” Gorges says.

The area where Dürr reckons there is big potential for this kind of simulation is in plants where the likelihood of changing demands increases the complexity. Perhaps wage costs are low at present, but look likely to rise, as in central Europe; perhaps production is intended to start small but grow; perhaps a single-model line will be required to take a mix of different models in the future.

There are some pretty universal rules about the levels of automation that different demands will require for individual operations, but rules don’t really allow for flexibility. Gorges says that Dürr found a lot of variation between assembly plants in the 250 or so plants worldwide where it has already supplied equipment.

It isn’t aiming to suppress this diversity, he says, or to create a uniform Dürr way of doing things. “It isn’t simply copying every time: every installation is different. But if you bring the processes into the model then you can make changes in technology and in other variables very quickly.” You can try before you buy. And you can do it quickly.

“We have a lot of countries where CKD or SKD (semi knock-down) will be used, and we can invest in quick time. Yes, they could do it independently of us. But they know from what we’ve already done that we know what we’re talking about.”