BMW Manufacturing: Autonomous Maintenance in the Body Shop
Autonomous Maintenance. All you have to do is get your Production Associates to clean and inspect the equipment. Sounds simple, right? What happens when you have to implement an Autonomous Maintenance program over 5000 pieces of equipment, 440 Maintenance Technicians and 1000 Production Associates? It can get a little complicated! Sustaining a consistent process can be very difficult. There always seems to be obstacles to keep things from going smoothly. The equipment has to be shut down in order to inspect it properly, but what if production cannot afford to shut it down? What about training, recording findings, transparency, KPIs, on and on!In the BMW Body Shop we have tackled all of these topics and more. We have had a strong Autonomous Maintenance program in place for over a decade now, but we are consistently trying to get better. Our Production Associates are spread across a 2.5 million square foot shop. That is the size of 14 Wal Mart department stores! They are responsible for inspecting various pieces of equipment including robots, weld guns, tip dressers and fixtures. Many of our Production Associates have had limited experience with production equipment when they are first hired. To make matters more difficult, they rotate stations, which means they have to adapt to Autonomous Maintenance in different areas of the shop. In this session, I will talk about the obstacles and challenges we have had to overcome. I will also share how the program has developed and gotten stronger over the years. I will discuss how we are still moving forward to make our Autonomous Maintenance program better.
