90 Years on the Production Line

Some thought the solution would be to invent some brilliantly low-cost engineering design. In the end, though, the key lay in one of the basic rules of economics: high production quantities make products cheaper. The answer, then, was conveyor belt production, and the Mladá Boleslav plant launched its first conveyor belt system 90 years ago.

Compared to the present, the numbers of cars sold in what is today the Czech Republic were very low. For example, over the first three months of 1925, the year Laurin & Klement became part of the Škoda Plzeň group, cars sold in Prague included 17 Laurin & Klements, 59 Pragas and 31 Tatras, to name just the best-selling brands. In late 1925, there were 12,580 registered passenger cars in what is today the Czech Republic according to research reports by Masaryk University in Brno. Today that figure stands at over 5.6 million.

Maintaining automotive production when volumes were so low was possible only thanks to the government’s protective policy that limited imports of foreign-made cars into Czechoslovakia. Yet Václav Klement, one of the company founders, knew how to make the business grow. Carefully monitoring international competitors, he saw that some of them were starting to use conveyor belt systems. To do the same thing, L&K needed major investment, and that was one of the reasons why the brand teamed up with ŠKODA.

The first step towards series production was a new four-storey body shop built in Mladá Boleslav. Completed in 1926, this new centre consisted of a storeroom in the basement, the production of wooden bodywork components on the ground floor, and upholstery and saddlery workshops on the first floor. On the second floor, wooden components were assembled to form whole car bodies, which were then metal-plated on the third floor and painted on the fourth.

This system, however, just gave a foretaste of conveyor belt capabilities. In April 1928, the Company lay the foundations for another building. Named Mechanics, this was a hall 200 metres in length and 130 metres wide. Construction was completed shortly before the end of 1928, and the site was put into operation in 1929. The building was used to assemble chassis and produce engines and gearboxes. The two buildings were subsequently interconnected – bodies finished on the fourth floor of the body shop were transported via a bridge to the Mechanics building, where the engines and chassis were mounted. This meant that the conveyor belt production system was complete, making ŠKODA one of the world’s first automakers to produce cars precisely yet cheaply. That was a heavy blow for all local competitors, and the company soon wielded absolute market dominance. In 1930, the production line was able to produce 25 vehicles a day. ŠKODA made a few tweaks and launched three-shift operations to increase daily capacity to 85 vehicles. The foundations for today’s success were thus laid 90 years ago.

Artificial intelligence has arrived, but it won’t work without people

Can staff take a break while the line is running? What happens in such a situation?

We have teams made up of ten people plus a floating coordinator. When a situation like that happens and one of the team members needs, for instance, to pop off to the loo, they are replaced by the team coordinator, who is properly trained in all of the required operations.

Looking ahead, what lies in store for conveyor belt production? More extensive use of robots?

Things are developing rapidly here. The welding shop is a good example: you will hardly find any manual point welding operations in our production system today. The new welding shop that we are now building for electric cars will be equipped with over 1,000 robots, with automation nudging 85%. And this process is not only about eliminating hard physical work. We also deploy automatic control systems, and artificial intelligence is already knocking on our door, too. The first area to be covered is that of check-up operations: for example, the surface of bodies painted in our paint shop is already checked by automatic scanners. We use Augmented Reality and failure prediction systems for maintenance operations. We will always need people, though. Believing that car production will do without people one day is like believing that at some point articles similar to this one will be generated by an automatic system.