BMW Production Methods: Day Two, an exercise with A Lego Car

Day 2 at BMW centered on a BMW employee teaching the students the BMW production system.  The Presentation, by Herr Rieger, was quite thorough and featured the Toyota system as modified by BMW.  To amplify the presentation Mr. Rieger had students break up into three teams of four each and develop a production system to assemble a Lego car.  Not as easy or childish as it looks. There were 5 attempts to hit a target of 40 seconds. While no team accomplished this, one team (Hilary, Evelyn, Peter, Zack)  consistently out did all the others, and  could put together a car in about 1 minute 5 seconds. The last exercise involved a switch of teams to take over existing systems devised by another team, and here the weakest team actually did quite well with the system devised by the best team.

We learned about waste, push, pull, flexibility, and far more today.