The Volkswagen production system and its dissemination: the "Stabile produktion"

Abstract

This report was commissioned to examine how the Volkswagen Group maintains its position in the automobile industry, a sector whose most remarkable feature is high competitiveness. The research draws attention to the fact that despite its competitive environment, thanks to Government aids and continuous development of the sector, companies such as Volkswagen play an important role in developed countries’ economy. This is due to the fact that the car is the more technological and cheaper product of the market and the most desirable product for customers nowadays. Further investigations reveal that different strategies, like decentralization or dismissing in quality are taken from different companies for staying in the market. However, in the Volkswagen case, quality and customer satisfaction are already targets, and standardize its procedures and operations in a Production system is its strategy. The report evaluates the method for implementing this Production system based on a Len philosophy and its satisfactory results until the moment. Besides, an important step for achieving this Lean manufacture in the factories is analyze; the ´´Stabile Produktion``