Visit at Volvo Trucks, Curitiba Monday 20110221

The Monday started with a visit to the Volvo plant in Curitiba. Volvo is a very popular company in Brazil and has been rated as among the 10 best companies to work in Brazil for several years and have also been rated as one of the most admired companies.  First Volvo presented some details of the plant and the Volvo production system (VPS). We learned that the Curitiba plant was opened in 1977 and have almost 4000 employees. The plant consists of engine production, assembly of trucks and buses and cab assembly. The Curitiba plant started to work with Volvo production system 1999 and have since then introduced many of the Lean tools and standard forms for improvement.

After the presentation we got a very interesting guided tour of the plant. We first saw the truck assembly area of both cabs and chassis. Halfway through the factory these two line met and the cab was fused with the chassi to form the truck. The guide told us that the assembly workers were divided into autonomous groups consisting of 20-25 workers. The groups worked independently and were responsible for reaching the performance objectives of the company. After the truck assembly we visited the engine assembly and we finally saw where the cab was welded together. The welding was both by industry robots and by manual work. After welding the cabs passed through the paint shop and received the customer’s choice of color.

The visit was very educational and it was very interesting to see a Volvo plant outside of Sweden.

 Mathias Jönsson, LTH for PADOK