Saturday, May 14, 2011
Europe Lean Tour - Italy Day
Today was our final day of Lean Benchmarking Tour. We began our day at Ducati, the legendary Italian motorcycle manufacturer - then we toured the Lamborghini factory and museum.
Italian motor companies are famous for their passion, and these two companies are leading the emotional charge.
Ducati as a company is focused on 'the rider' and the high performance factor of the bikes. During high season, they're producing 220 motorcycles per day, half of that in fall and winter.
Motorcycles are assembled on four production lines, each line focused on one family of bikes. Since 1990 their quality has increased steadily, from engine defects over 5% coming off the line to under 1% today.
Lamborghini currently operates two assembly lines, one for the Gallardo, and one for the soon to begin production of the Aventador – Lambo’s newest top-range vehicle which features 6.5 litre 700 HP V12 engine.
The Avantador has a carbon fibre cockpit and roof. When it's complete, it weighs only 1535 Kg. We were very fortunate to see the preproduction of the Aventador.
Comparing the two lines, the Gallardo line has 24 assembly stations, and the new Avantador has 10. They are only producing 6 Gallardo’s a day, and expected to produce about 3 of the Aventador per day when the production is up and running fully.
Duing this preproduction model, they are investing a tremendous amount of time to fine tune the assembly of the Aventador. The quality is evident in every part of the car. It takes 10 cow hides to complete one interior!
The lines themselves are immaculate, and 5S is certainly a way of life at Lamborghini. There are also many evidences of lean, such as kitting process, Kanban, and standard operating procedures posted where they are clearly important.
Each new car gets test driven 50-60 kilometers before customer delivery.
After the plant tours, we were off to the Lamborghini factory museum and the family museum, where we delved deeply into the company's history and saw more incredible products made by Lamborghini, including tractors, pumps, a helicopter and of course the original Lamborghini Countach.
We were very fortunate to meet Favio Lamborghini, the nephew of the founder. He personally showed us around the family museum and explained in intricate details how Lamborghini built its empire.
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1 comment:
Hello David,
What an impressive tour you have made with your black belts. Hope they enjoyed Europe.
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