BMW Group Plant Dingolfing, Accoladed The ‘Automotive Lean Production Award’

The BMW Group Plant Dingolfing has received the 2022 ‘Automotive Lean Production Award’, making it one of the best plants in Europe at applying lean production alongside digital innovation.

Said accolade won under the ‘OEM’ (Original Equipment Manufacturer) category was for BMW’s consistent execution of its iFACTORY plan at its Technology Assembly site in Lower Bavaria.

This year, the prize is being awarded for the 16th time by trade magazine Automobil Produktion and the management consultancy Agamus Consult.

BMW AG’s production management board member, Milan Nedeljković, remarked, “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.”

Notably, BMW is using this strategy to orient its plants in their shift to e-mobility, meaning all of its future production will be lean, green and digital. Simply put, efficient, sustainable and digitalized. 

According to the judges, the assembly at the BMW Group Plant Dingolfing is pursuing this aim wholeheartedly, with an “excellent interplay of lean and digital”.

They added, the plant’s “lean DNA” was evident at every stage, the Dingolfing vehicle assembly were making many “small” improvements “from within”, and were implementing these very quickly.

Significantly, the judges for this industry award were particularly impressed by the many digital use cases being implemented in the Dingolfing Assembly. 

Namely, applications in the fields of data analytics, planning/line balancing of assembly staff, quality assurance, smart and predictive upkeep, operator support, automated driving at the site, and virtual factory planning and commissioning.

Agamus Consults’s managing director and jury member, Dr. Werner Geiger, said, “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’.”

He added, the strong “interconnection of projects with the value stream” also played a major role in awarding the prize. Despite the digitalization process, the focus is always on people.

BMW Group Plant Dingolfing’s vehicle assembly director, Gunther Böhner, concluded, “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 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.”

Moving forward, the company wants to take advantage of the prospects digitalization has to offer in order to remain competitive, while also doing its part to protect the environment.