Volkswagen factory in Kassel
The Volkswagen plant in Kassel in Baunatal in the district of Kassel (own spelling: Volkswagen plant in Kassel , short: VW plant in Kassel ) is with around 17,300 employees - after the main plant in Wolfsburg - the second largest production facility of Volkswagen AG in Germany.
The VW plant in Kassel is located in Baunatal- Altenbauna on the federal highway 49 . The plant does not manufacture vehicles, but rather supplies components to other plants in the group. In addition, the processing of exchange units and the original parts center are located.
history
With the beginning of the “ economic miracle ”, when the sale of the Volkswagen Beetle and Transporter dominated the automotive industry in West Germany, Volkswagen employed over 41,000 people in Wolfsburg , Braunschweig and Hanover in 1957. The market share at the time was 32.5 percent, and for station wagons and delivery vans even 37.6 percent.
In order to meet the increasing domestic demand and the ever increasing export, the Volkswagenwerk GmbH under the direction of Heinrich Nordhoff acquired on October 5, 1957 for a new factory building in the Lohwald in Altenbauna with the halls of the former Henschel Flugmotorenbau GmbH . The area, which at that time still belonged to Kassel , fell to the newly founded town of Baunatal in 1966 . In addition to the central location of North Hesse in the Federal Republic of Germany , the favorable price due to the insolvency of the Henschel works contributed to the location decision . With an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent in the region, there were also enough skilled workers available.
As early as November 25, 1957, the Supervisory Board approved the investment program amounting to 7.2 million D-Marks and approved a further 12.9 million D-Marks for the renovation and repair of the company premises. Nordhoff announced that the Kassel plant will become the center of the spare parts service and the production of spare parts. In the spring of 1958, the unit preparation was also relocated to Kassel. A little later, the construction of the first new halls began, which gradually supplemented the old buildings from the 1930s that had been taken over by the Henschel company and later completely replaced them.
The first plant manager in Kassel was Rudolf Leiding ; from 1971 to 1975 Chairman of the Board of Management of Volkswagenwerk AG. He was responsible for the construction from 1958 and remained there until 1965. The date of commissioning of the plant is July 1st, 1958: initially with the unit reconditioning (replacement engines and gears), which was relocated from Wolfsburg to Kassel.
On June 23, 1958, with the preparation of cylinder heads, carburetors, fuel pumps and clutches, the manufacture of replacement parts begins in the old Henschel halls. In the recycling process, VW owners are offered reconditioned components in exchange for used units at favorable conditions. On July 28, 1958, the overhaul of complete engines started. On December 31, 1958, 794 workers and 61 salaried employees were employed at the Volkswagen factory in Kassel.
The factory was gradually expanded as early as 1959. In 1961 Hall 4 and its own power plant were built, and in 1964 a press shop went into operation. Hall 5 was built in 1965. Production was expanded to include individual components, engines and transmissions.
In 1964 Altenbauna became a district of the newly founded town of Baunatal . The VW plant in Kassel kept its name. Hall 3 was completed in 1971. It was built to centrally store spare parts for the VW models. In the 1990s this task was taken over by the OTC ( Original Parts Center ) and the areas of Hall 3 were made available for production.
In 2001 a technology center for the foundry was established.
On the north side of the halls there is the so-called north edge building, which houses up to three floors of office space. The four production halls and the north edge building in front are around 1,400 m long in total. The individual halls are up to 570 m wide. In January 2001, a total of 850,494 m² was available for production and material storage.
In addition to the production and storage facilities in Baunatal, former AEG production facilities in Kassel-Bettenhausen are part of the VW plant. The halls located in Lilienthalstrasse (formerly Junkers - Motorenbau Werk Kassel ) house the aggregate preparation, which was relocated there from Hall 4.
The halls of the plant currently contain the following departments:
| building | Departments |
|---|---|
| Hall 1 | Gear manufacturing, hardening, tool making, gear shipping system |
| Hall 2 | Visitor service, body shop , press shop , form hardening , exhaust system production |
| Hall 3 | Gear manufacturing, hardening, gear component development |
| Hall 3a | Gear manufacturing |
| Hall 4 | Forge, gear manufacturing, hardening shop, Volkswagen Group Academy, training workshop, pilot hall (pre-series gear manufacturing) |
| Hall 4a | Gear manufacturing |
| Hall 5 | Foundry VW-Kassel / Baunatal |
In addition to the aforementioned halls, in which the production departments and spare parts storage are housed, there are also various smaller halls on the factory premises, in which service departments and storage areas are housed. In addition, there is a sewage treatment plant and a power plant on the factory premises.
On June 29, 2015, a 22-year-old worker was killed by a production robot at the VW plant. The spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Kassel said that another fatal accident involving a robot was “not remembered”.
Buildings and factory areas
North edge construction
The one-kilometer-long building complex at the Kassel plant is known as the north edge building. Various offices and lounges are housed there on up to three floors. A total of three canteens as well as the health and rescue facilities can also be found there. Overall, the north edge building is divided into 20 individual areas - so-called sectors - between which there is always a staircase.
Gear manufacturing and hardening shop
The Kassel plant is the “lead plant” for the Volkswagen Group's gearbox production . With 12,000 gearboxes per day during a 21-shift week, around half of all gearboxes in the group are manufactured and parts of them are hardened . In 2008, the 4,200 employees produced around 2.8 million transmissions for Volkswagen , Audi , Seat and Škoda models. The goal of gearbox production in Baunatal is to build up to four million gearboxes a year. In March 2010, the one hundred millionth transmission left the Kassel plant.
The manufactured gear parts arrive in the hardening shop before they are assembled. With over 260,000 individual parts to be hardened per day, the Kassel plant has the largest hardening shop in Europe. Gas carbonitrided be for a period of ten hours, including switching , dental and drive wheels at a temperature of 950 degrees Celsius .
In order to open up new production orders and with regard to alternative drive solutions, in addition to traditional production, a separate development department (transmission component development) that works on the development of components such as
- Rear axle
- Center differential
- Double coupling
- Mechatronics
- E-drive Electric traction drive .
and which operates its own small test field with development test benches for testing these components.
Prototypes or pre-series components are manufactured in a pre-series and technology center.
Each individual transmission type is an independent cost center . These are named after the respective gearbox name to ensure quick assignment. An example would be the VW Scirocco III with the 1.4 TSI engine and a torque of 200 Nm ; Both its gearbox and the cost center are called DQ 200 , where the D describes a direct shift gearbox - or DSG for short - and the Q describes the transverse installation of the gearbox.
Aluminum and magnesium foundry
Aluminum scrap purchased throughout Europe is processed and melted down for the aluminum remelting facility in the foundry at the VW plant in Kassel, which went into operation in 1986. As a result of further modifications, the foundry was equipped with fully automatic casting machines, which resulted in considerable physical relief for the employees there.
The foundry is Europe's largest recycling plant for light metals and, since 2007, also for magnesium. Currently, more than 10,000 gear housings are processed every day, in which the proportion of magnesium is around 20 percent.
Volkswagen Academy
The Volkswagen Akademie AG is also integrated into the north edge building . She is responsible for the planning, organization and implementation of in-company training and further education and offers support and provision for courses.
Original parts center
With the increasing variety of models of the VW Group and the decision to stock all original spare parts centrally in one location, the decision was made to build the OTC (OTC stands for Original Parts Center) at the Kassel location. The OTC warehouses were built from 1992. In 1994 the OTC 1 was inaugurated, which took over the stocking of the spare parts that were previously located in Hall 3. In the following year, the OT Center 2 and the center for intelligent vehicle parts were inaugurated. In 2005 OTC 3 and 4 were put into operation. With the completion of OTC 3 and 4, around 400,000 original parts can now be stored. OTC 5 has now also been put into operation.
Lettering and logo
The Volkswagen lettering in capital letters on the roof of the north edge building is reminiscent of the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg from a distance . The five-meter-high letters, distributed over a length of 190 meters, were affixed in 1964 by the company headquarters from Wolfsburg in the Kassel plant and can not be found anywhere else in Germany .
The special feature of this lettering is the lighting at night. It glows completely in blue at dusk and in the dark, but on the occasion of the 50th anniversary in Kassel, the letters K and S are highlighted lighter. In this way, the plant would like to express its connection to the Kassel location, which has the identifier KS as a vehicle registration number .
In 2010 the Volkswagen logo was converted to new, more energy-saving LED lamps.
As in Wolfsburg, the logo of the Volkswagen brand can also be seen in Kassel . At eight meters in diameter, it was the largest rotating VW logo in the world.
Infrastructure
The VW plant has a floor area of 2,404,737 m². The walk from the entrance of the plant to the other end takes about thirty minutes (on foot).
The built-up area - production facilities, social facilities, material stores and parking spaces for employees' vehicles - amounts to a total of 850,494 m² and thus around a third of the total area.
The production facilities of the plant as well as the storage areas of the OTC are located directly on the A 49 . This means that there is an excellent connection to the German motorway network, both in north-south ( A 7 ) and east-west ( A 44 ) directions .
Apart from the good road traffic connections, both the halls of the OTC and those of the plant all have sidings that are connected to the rail network of the DB. A significant part of the dispatch of goods is handled by train transport.
The internal transport is carried out almost exclusively with electric vehicles in order to reduce the pollution of the hall air to a minimum.
power supply
The plant's energy supply is ensured by the power plant located on the plant premises. The natural gas-fired power plant works with combined heat and power and is used to provide technical heat and space heating in the production halls and as district heating for the town of Baunatal. Around 640,000 megawatt hours of electricity and 430,000 megawatt hours of heat are required each year. 70% of the electricity required is generated in the power plant itself. The plant also generates electricity through a solar system. In addition, around 930,000 m³ of drinking water are required every year.
Workforce and divisions March 2007
There are around twelve percent women in management positions. VW Coaching GmbH has the highest proportion of women at 26 percent.
| Department | Employees | comment |
|---|---|---|
| Gear manufacturing | 4442 | Around half of all gearboxes required in the group come from Baunatal. The annual output is around 2.7 million in 2007. |
| foundry | 1073 | It is Europe's largest aluminum and magnesium foundry and, in addition to gear housings, also produces body parts. |
| Exhaust system construction | 638 | Complete systems including lambda sensors and soot particle filters are built here. |
| Press shop / body shop | 1541 | Manufacture of body and platform parts for the Passat and other vehicles. |
| Aggregate preparation | 280 | Reconditioning of engines and transmissions |
| OTC | 2575 | Worldwide sales of original parts for almost all group brands |
| Other areas | 1894 | Plant logistics, logistics, quality assurance, human resources, plant security, commercial operations, controlling, plant technology |
List of plant managers
- Rudolf Leiding (1957-1965)
- Hans Kialka (1965-1969)
- Hubert Biehler (1969-1981)
- Fritz Zorn (1981-1993)
- Hans-Christian Maergner (1993-1997)
- Wolfram Thomas (1997-2002)
- Rüdiger Weißner (2002-2005)
- Hans-Helmut Becker (2006 - 2014)
- Falko Rudolph (2014 - 2015)
- Thorsten Jablonski (2016 - 2018)
- Olaf Korzinovski (from 2018)
Volkswagen Sound Orchestra
The Volkswagen Sound Orchestra does not play exclusively for the automobile manufacturer Volkswagen.
- The drums of the Volkswagen Sound Orchestra do not consist of a conventional drum set, but of components that are / were manufactured at Volkswagen Kassel. These include the components center tunnel, subframe lower part, converter, bonnet, exhaust pipe, various sheet metal parts from the exhaust system, SGR holder, planetary carrier, drive shafts, coil spring, wheel blanks and grinding wheels as well as an "Ad Blue container".
literature
- Hans-Helmut Becker (ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-936962-51-2
Individual evidence
- ^ Volkswagen plant in Kassel
- ↑ a b c d e f Hans-Helmut Becker (Ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, pp. 412-427
- ↑ Worker in VW plant killed by robot
- ↑ Robot kills worker at Volkswagen plant in Germany
- ↑ a b Hans-Helmut Becker (Ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, p. 36
- ↑ Hans-Helmut Becker (ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, p. 50
- ↑ Hans-Helmut Becker (ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, pp. 38–43
- ↑ a b c Hans-Helmut Becker (Ed.): The people. The work. A future. 50 years of the Volkswagen plant in Kassel. Siebenhaar Verlag, 2008, pp. 14-15
- ↑ www.soundorchestra.de - Volkswagen plant Kassel
Web links
- When there was still the wage packet - lecture on the 60th anniversary of the Volkswagen contract in Baunatal. Report by Rainer Sander.
- HNA report from Sven Kühling - Review of the history of VW Kassel: Wages came in a metal car
- HNA report 11/17/2017 from Sven Kühling - Lecture November 15, 2017 in Baunatal by Günther Pöpperl - 60 years of signing the contract with Volkswagen Kassel in Baunatal
- volkswagen-mediaservices.com - Kassel plant
- HNA Regiowiki: Volkswagen plant Kassel in Baunatal
- www.soundorchestra.de
Coordinates: 51 ° 15 ′ 10 ″ N , 9 ° 26 ′ 10 ″ E