October 12 - Regensburg

October 12 – Monday – Regensburg

Another gorgeous morning.  We awoke in Bach, south of Regensburg, at 8:00 a.m. on a frosty morning.  For us Vermonters it was crisp but lovely in the upper 40’s for the Australians and folks from Arizona and Bangkok it was downright freezing and they were bundled up with hats and mittens.

As soon as we were off the ship, it started further south heading for Vilshofen just north of Passau.  We hopped into our buses and headed into Regensheim where we had a 2 hour tour of the town before bus #3 headed to the BMW plant.  

We walked across the stone bridge built in the 12th century, and our guide filled us with data about why this town was a huge trading place being perfectly situated on the water.  We saw the building where salt was stored and learned of the importance of salt in the middle ages when it served as a preserving agent, a tanning agent, a wool agent, and of course a spice.  It was called ‘white gold’. Thanks to its location along the Danube, it has become  a popular tourist site not just for foreigners but for Germans as well. It was one of Hitler’s favorite towns because it looked so traditional.  It had a fairly large Jewish population before the war, and we passed many sites where Jews assigned to the stone quarries worked before being sent to Dachau.   The main town square, like all others had THE cathedral, and from there one could head to various shopping streets.  

At 10:30 we BMW tour people walked back across the stone bridge to our bus which took us to the outskirts of town where we were met at the plant by a lovely British woman of about 32 years of age.  She moved to Germany being in love with a young German, learned the language and is now the guide for BMW with most English groups.  She was delightful and knowledgeable and for the next three hours we visited inside the plant.  This plant is the most automated of all BMW plants and turns out about 1200 cars/day.  That is an outstanding number…but when one walked in the plant you understood why.  We saw three main sections: The Body Shop where the structure is put together; The Paint Shop where interiors and exteriors are painted; and the Assembly Shop where lights, tires, steering wheels, gas caps, etc are put on the car.

I was mesmerized by the robots which seemed almost human.  In the body shop there are 2350 robots and 1000 humans – of which 2/3 are programmers.  The humans work in shifts, so that at any one time the 2350 robots are being managed by about 100 humans.  In fact in the body shop one saw almost no humans…. A few at quality control stations; a few that opened and closed ‘garage’ style doors where robots were working behind, and a few delivering parts to the robots.  Each robot in one area did about 1650 unique copper welds, and when they got to that number they automatically replaced their copper’fingers’ and kept going.  It takes about nine hours for the parts to become a body.  They then move to the paint shop which takes about eleven hours to paint and dry the car, and finally nine hours in the assembly shop.  So basically every two days a car went from nothing to fully running car ready to be road-tested.

The Paint Shop employed only 900 humans of which 2/3 were robotics programmers and such. Each car is given five coats of paint.  The surface of the car is somewhat magnetic at this point so the robotic paint sprayers could make a perfect coating….and for me the magical thing was: the cars are not done in any order so that we watched first a black sedan, then a white convertible and finally a red suv type car go thru the paint process….using the same damn paint sprayers.  The robotic sprayer can change its color nozzles in seven!!!! Seconds.  And no spillage from one to the next occurs. 

Since every car is unique, we learned that of the 270,000 cars made per year NO TWO are alike – people want different colors, different steering wheels, different location of steering wheels based on where it will be driven, and on and on.  I found that amazing – truly Just in Time manufacturing.

The final stop was the assembly shop which is where we saw the most humans, because here the small parts, tailored to each car are put on.  Each worker has less than 28 seconds to complete their task, and the cars are running on a permanent belt as they move through the processes from windshield wiper installation to gas tank cover, to the final adding of the medallion at the end.  If a person takes longer, the computer starts playing a song in that area that alerts supervisors to slow down the belt, and on computer screens through out this area they show how many seconds different cars took – the highest we saw was 50 seconds – which means 50 seconds MORE than the allotted 28 seconds.  That’s a major screwup…but most were at zero or close to that.  To avoid a job being too repetitive, the worker is told when he has done a task for 30 minutes, and he should do something else. If he wants he can stay for up to two hours, but then he MUST go to a new assignment.  All of course with the robot doing the ‘heavy lifting’ raising the car to put something underneath, or raising up the nose so a grill can be put on without strain.  The guy doing tires was amazing: he stood in one place, along came the car at the same time as the tire of choice for that particular car rolled in front of him….perfectly timed.  He simply aimed the tire at the wheel, a gadget came and tightened the wheel, and presto 28 seconds later it was on its way.

Another interesting factoid is that while the car, including its doors and trunk are all painted at exactly the same time, it is easier for assembly human workers not to have the car doors on.They can get at the inner parts more easily….so the doors are taken off by the robots, and are following the car on a separate track until at one point, presto they are put back on the same car to which they had been previously attached. God forbid a different door would line up with a car.

The guides for what is required for each car are three pieces of paper with bar codes which are attached to the hood.  The robot is reading these bar codes to know what color, what steering wheel, what tire etc. is to be  put on THAT particular car.

Getting and organizing the parts for assembly workers for a  particular car are done by a human, who reads the bar codes from a computer screen where the  part required is symbolized by a picture of an apple, an umbrella, a kitten etc.  They found that someone quickly seeking a particular required part did better locating a part with such a simple kindergarten symbol than some numerical code.  It looked like children picking toys from bins.  At the end of assembly, voila…. A car.  It is taken out to be tested and every 10th car is actually taken out on a test track and driven by BMW employees.  Now That’s the job to have.!!

My only sorrow is that BMW does not employee many women in the plants.  Overall 25% of the workforce is female, and in assembly less than 7%. Naturally there is a fire department, an emergency hospital and all manner of employee support systems available. And as a manager you get a new BMW every year to drive (not unlike Belgium where employees got cars as well).

All in all a fabulous tour.  Afterwards we all reflected on how awed we all had been by the robots, hopped on our bus and went back to town, and once more walked across the stone bridge for lunch (wurst house right next to the salt storage area at the foot of the bridge) and to meet the rest of our fellow  passengers.  Then we all walked back (4th time) across the damn stone bridge and headed out of town.  At this point I had over 6 miles of walking between the four crossings of the bridge, the walk through the plant, and ambling in general.  I was glad to be done for the day.

Because the boat moves so slowly we needed to stall for time before driving to Vilshoven, so we drove on backroads into the Bavarian Wild Life park for a small ‘snack’ at 5:00 p.m.  The drive through the park was beautiful with lush dark trees and winding roads.  We landed up at a typically Bavarian guest house where our light ‘snack’ was beer, dark bread and a full plate of cheese and sausage.  The place was called Gut Schmelmerhof and even our guides didn’t know it.  It had been recommended by Uniworld HQ in Basel Switzerland when they knew we needed to allow for some stall-time.  It turns out a woman in HQ grew up in the Bavarian wood area and suggested it. So blindly we went, and blindly we were delighted.

Finally after another hour we were back at the ship where we were not alone.  All manner of river boats were there having taken the same tactic as we.  So since the places to ‘park’ the boats were limited, our River Princess was tied up to another river boat of another company which in turn was tied to another.  So we walked through two lobbies and into our ship where I chose NOT to have dinner but to go to bed instead.

A full and wonderful day.