Salching, January 2014 - On 16th January 2014, Boysen MVO in Salching assembled its ten millionth just-in-sequence exhaust system. The milestone system was finished on schedule at 18:06. After passing its final inspection and a quick photoshoot, the twin pipe system was delivered on time to the BMW plant in Dingolfing and installed in a black BMW 550 iX the same day - just five and a half hours after the order was received online by the ordering system at the Boysen Group's local assembly plant in Salching.
Production managers and employees from Boysen MVO did not have much time to celebrate on 16th January. "As a just-in-sequence manufacturer of complete exhaust systems, we are essentially an extension of the assembly lines at the BMW plants in Dingolfing and Regensburg", says Boysen MVO plant manager, Thomas Hanser. "We produce exactly what the customer orders and in the precise sequence required in the vehicle assembly plants. We have defined time windows to do this. We cannot allow ourselves any delayed deliveries or even stoppages under any circumstances."
The trained vehicle mechanic and time and motion expert Thomas Hanser has been working at Boysen for more than 30 years. He was one of the first to start work at the Salching site. Hanser was involved in the new local assembly plant construction from day one. Under his leadership, production began on 18th April 1994. This means that Boysen MVO will shortly be celebrating another anniversary - 20 years of just-in-sequence production for BMW.
"The JIS principle was developed from just-in-time and has been used in the automotive industry since the beginning of the 1990s", recalls the Boysen MVO plant manager. "However, we were the first in the world to apply it to assembly of complete exhaust systems", says Hanser. He adds: "It was a minor logistical sensation at the time." It was also a commercial risk for the medium-sized supplier. "Plenty of people in the industry were speculating that we'd fail", says Thomas Hanser. "On a day like today, this makes us even more grateful for the faith that BMW showed in us back then."
Over the years, Boysen MVO has justified the customer's faith with excellent delivery reliability, exceptional product quality and continuous development of the JIS system. From a few dozen exhaust systems per day initially, the plant's output recently reached around 2650 units per day.
In 2013, the 160 employees at Boysen MVO assembled a total of 644,103 complete exhaust systems and delivered them to BMW in Dingolfing and Regensburg, as well as to Rolls Royce in Goodwood. The major challenge for Thomas Hanser and his employees is not so much the pure volumes as the increasing complexity and diversity of the exhaust systems to be produced. "In our early years, our range was made up of perhaps 50 different systems," Hanser recalls. "Back then, an exhaust system was made up of about a dozen individual parts. By contrast, today we assemble 200 different models every day, each of them with 25 parts."
Boysen develops and produces manifolds, catalytic converters, diesel particulate filters, silencers, trims and complete exhaust systems for cars, commercial vehicles and off-highway applications. In addition to its three main customers Audi, BMW and Daimler, the exhaust technology specialist works for the German car manufacturers Volkswagen and Porsche, the British manufacturers Bentley and Rolls Royce, the commercial vehicle manufacturers MAN and Daimler, and for Krauss Mafffei, mtu, Voith and others in the off-highway sector.
In the 2012 financial year, the Boysen Group had around 2000 employees and achieved a turnover of 984 million Euro. Close to the development and administration centre in Altensteig, the company is currently building an innovation centre in Nagold. In addition to the production plant in Altensteig, Boysen has production sites in Simmersfeld, Salching, Plauen and Achim, and also in France, Egypt, India, South Africa, China and the USA.
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In case of any queries, please contact:
Martin Stuka
Press and Public Relations
Friedrich Boysen GmbH & Co. KG
Friedrich-Boysen-Straße 14-17
72213 Altensteig
Tel. 07453/20-274
Fax 07453/20-4274
E-mail martin.stuka(at)boysen-online.de
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