Q & A with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Helmut-Joseph Schramm, BMW Group
What motivates you to make production processes at BMW Motorrad more flexible?
Schramm:
We have the largest number of variants in the motorcycle industry. Individuality is virtually a trademark of BMW Motorrad. No two bikes are alike; every customer can put together his or her own individual motorcycle. At the BMW Group plant in Berlin, we work with around 11,000 living part numbers – the resulting complexity can only be handled with intelligent solutions. Flexibility is also a crucial tool for increasing resilience. Our flexible production system makes us successful as a team even in times of high volatility.
What kind of intelligent solutions are you thinking of?
Schramm:
The range of possibilities extends from intelligent solutions for realizing customized designs within the series production process to networking production processes using artificial intelligence methods. One example from so-called smart logistics is intelligent robots that facilitate the production process. Such as »Sortbot«. It autonomously sorts around 5,000 empty containers a day, stacks them and makes them available to logistics for collection. In the process, the robot is able to identify various container shapes and types using a 3D camera and sort them onto the correct pallet using artificial intelligence. It is important that we always look at the entire production process.
What do you mean by that?
Schramm:
The so-called intra-process logistics play a very decisive role. What I see is that in production, logistics between processing steps is often neglected. However, it is an important cross-sectional function: If production processes fail, it is usually not due to individual production steps, such as machining, but because coordination from one process step to the next doesn’t work – for example, if material is missing in the next processing step. That’s why we won’t get to self-optimizing systems without smart logistics.