ASSEMBLY magazine is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, we are publishing a series of articles examining the past, present and future of various assembly technologies.
The most common question we get is some version of “I have just been assigned as our lean champion; what should I do?” The next most common question is “I need to hire a lean champion; where do I find one?”
At the DaimlerChrysler (Stuttgart, Germany) plant in Bremen, Germany, it is the Body-In-White (BIW) Rollout and Process Optimization Department that makes sure everything goes together correctly.
When a metal component or part is marked with a steel stamp, the process is basically cold forging-material is moved around or compressed. Therefore, for a stamp to be durable and produce a clear mark, it must be hard, and have sharp edges and a smooth surface along the entire relief angle of the character.
In addition to being flexible enough to handle multiple, small production runs, the behr GmbH (Blaichach, Germany) system needed to be built in such a way that it would dovetail smoothly with seven existing machines.
To ensure quality and enable cradle-to-grave traceability of its automotive products, the BorgWarner Inc. (Auburn Hills, MI) facility in Tulle, France, recently installed a testing and part-marking system developed by French system integrator Alema Automation (Mérignac, France).
ASSEMBLY magazine is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. To mark the occasion, we are publishing a series of articles examining the past, present and future of various assembly technologies.
We’ve all read the nursery rhyme, written in 1640 by George Herbert and repeated ad infinitum by innumerable writers, including Ben Franklin: “For want of a nail, the horse’s shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. And for want of a battle, the kingdom was lost.”
RSS