EXPLORING INDUSTRIALIZATION @MUNICH ELECTRIFICATION
Whether you're curious about our latest projects or the future of industrialization:
Join us today for an insightful conversation with our colleagues Mircea and Pierina as we delve into the exciting journey of industrialization at Munich Electrification. Discover how our dedicated team is shaping the industry with innovative solutions and long-lasting practices.
Mircea Lazar
Hi Mircea, thank you for joining us today. Please tell us a bit more about you and your role at Munich Electrification.
Hi. My name is Mircea Lazar. I am from Romania and I am a passionate hands-on process engineer. All of my career has evolved around manufacturing of electrical components, thus gathering over 12 years of experience in processes and technologies in this field. I have been working for Munich Electrification for almost 6 years now. During that time I have grown a lot together with the company and have happily acted in different roles managing production partners and improving our product range for efficient and qualitative manufacturability. Nowadays, I am working as a Process Technology Manager in the Industrialization department of ME.
What do we talk about today?
I am proud to talk today about the concept of our sample shop. Industrialization is a key process which accompanies development, making sure that the products ME is designing and offering to the market are well manufactured and meet the highest quality and reliability standards.
What is manufacturing at ME?
Munich Electrification focuses on the area of development and innovation for both hardware and software components for battery management systems. We want to be the best in this development field, so we put all of our focus on it and partner with well known and best in class manufacturing companies that provide us the services of manufacturing the developed products in volumes required by our customers.
Additionally, ME understood from the beginning, that high-end and well developed products mean nothing if we cannot bring them to our customers in high volumes and top notch quality so users can benefit from them in the years to come. This is why as an R&D (Research & Development) company, Munich Electrification also decided to keep in-house the core knowledge about the manufacturing processes, which are key to the product range we offer. The industrialization department's role is exactly focused on this task of finding the perfect processes as well as taking an active part in the design of our products during development phases so that we can obtain excellence in manufacturing.
What is the sample shop mission?
The sample shop is the playground where design, process technology, and the industrialization engineers come together to find the optimal manufacturing solution for our newly developed products.
It follows a microfactory setup, simulating the series production environment and providing real-time feedback for the design engineers to implement during the next design phase. The sample shop includes workstations equipped with specific jigs, camera detection systems, cloud traceability solutions, digital work instructions, and all specific processes required for assembling the products.
We are focusing on 3 main pillars when sourcing and preparing equipment for the sample shop, and these are:
What difficulties have to be solved during development/industrialization/in daily work?
Experience in manufacturing plants highlighted the critical importance of integrating shop floor feedback into the design process. The establishment of a sample shop has facilitated this goal, allowing for closer collaboration between the production site and design engineers. This setup enables the simulation of production conditions, where small batches are built, and extensive data is collected from both equipment monitoring systems and technician feedback. This process is essential for testing the manufacturability of new designs and ensuring that they meet the necessary production standards.
What are the benefits of sample production at ME?
Some of the key benefits are:
Early feedback for design for manufacturing (DFM).
Top-quality parts from early sample phases for the benefit of our customers.
Short cycle times and lead times for manufacturing samples, and being able to gather feedback, hence reducing the overall time to market of our products.
Enabling industrialization engineers to collect lessons learned and optimize the requirements for series production lines.
Thank you very much, Mircea, for these interesting insights. Now, handing over to Pierina, could you also tell us a bit about yourself?
Pierina Moreno-Drexler
Certainly. My name is Pierina Moreno-Drexler, Head of Industrialization and Supplier Quality Management at Munich Electrification. For the past 12 years, I've been dedicated to driving manufacturing innovation with a strong focus on global strategy and quality management within the electric mobility sector.
In my current role, I am leading the Industrialization team at ME, for which our main targets are to introduce new products according to customer expectations, facilitate seamless product launching, and develop state-of-the-art assembly and testing solutions.
What are the challenges that the industry is facing nowadays and how are we tackling them?
In today's automotive and stationary battery systems rapidly evolving market, the status quo is undergoing a significant transformation. To maintain a competitive advantage and achieve success in the industry, it is important that we deliver three key value propositions to our customers: cutting-edge innovation, accelerated time-to-market, and sustainable solutions.
To realize these objectives, our Sample Shop plays a pivotal role by bringing our designers and process engineers together to achieve high-quality and cost-effective products through design-for-manufacturing, while at the same time, it enables them to accelerate project development with faster production iterations. Additionally, centralizing our efforts within our headquarters eliminates the need for additional transportation of resources and physical components, thereby minimizing our carbon footprint.
Our Headquarters Sample Shop is a good example of how we position ourselves as industry leaders in the Battery Management System domain, ready to meet the challenges of a changing market and our customers’ most demanding needs.
