Visit at Scania Latin America Ltda. – Sao Paulo, Thursday 2011-02-24

During the whole day of 24^th Feb. 2011, we have visited the Scania production plant in Sao Paulo. Scania is producing heavy vehicles in Brazil since 1952. Today they are producing heavy trucks as well as bus chassis. Scania is also entering into the new segment of special trucks for mining. The bus body building is mostly done by Marco Polo. The Scania factory in Sao Paulo has 4954 employees. Scania has shown a turnover of 3.010 million USD in 2010 in Latin America. They currently have a market share of 28.4% of the heavy trucks market in Brazil.  In Latin America, Scania have industrial manufacturing facilities in Brazil and Argentina. The commercial operations are also present in other countries like Mexico, Peru and Venuzvela. We were greeted by the vice president of production and development Stefan Palskog. After a quick presentation of Scania in Latin America we received a tour of all four different major divisions of the company, these divisions were the Chassis- , Cab- , Engine- and Transmission workshop. After a great lunch, the Swedish Production Academy was presented to Scania. Following this we received a presentation on the work on modularizing the different trucks manufactured by Scania. All of the trucks produced by Scania are based upon a series of different modules which could be combined in one of many different manners in order to fit the costumer’s demands. After this followed a presentation on the IT-systems used by Scania globally. Between 4-5 PM, some of the group members of PADOK enjoyed test drives of new trucks. The production systems and machining groups had the opportunity to present their research work to Scania. Scania had asked for separate workshops with each of these two groups in order to further exchange knowledge. During these two parallel workshops the involved PhD-students were able to present their research for the personnel working in similar areas at Scania. The event was ended with a presentation by Prof. Kinnander on differences between productivity of sub-suppliers in Sweden as well as several different regions of the world. The possibilities for further improvements of the Scania production were then discussed ending a long but very giving day.

Thank you Scania, Stefan and his fantastic staff for a great day!!

 Our Host Stefan Palskog

 On our way to the factory

 Karin, Nomi and Kerstin with Marcelo Gallo

 Suzana Martin Scania with Vicktoria Rogstrand KTH.

 Mathias Agmell LTH

Test driving!