GMSCM Students Visit Chery Jaguar Land Rover

Chery Jaguar Land Rover (CJLR), the most successful Sino-British joint venture, is leading the way for Chinese companies on how to bringing in and promoting advanced manufacturing technologies, and exploring and innovating JV management practices.

Sept. 6, 2017 Changshu - Students from GMSCM program of McGill & Zhejiang university visited Jaguar Land Rover (JLR)’s “Global Model Factory”- CJLR’s Changshu factory, and started a discovery journey of “Finding the Smart”.

CJLR’s Changshu Factory, located in Changshu’ EDZ, comprises a world-class aluminum body shop, a press shop, a paint shop, a flexible trim & final shop, and a newly built powertrain shop which was just put into operation this July. The factory can perform the whole manufacturing process of a vehicle, from body building to final assembly. The highly automated manufacturing process and the efficient logistic management has set a benchmark for the auto industry.

After a short icebreaking, students and professors visited the main shops orderly. In the body shop, automatic rivet technology is widely utilized and thus has dramatically reduced the air pollution generated by traditional steel plate welding. The concept of environmental protection has been embedded in the plant. To students’ surprise, its attempt of building aluminum body can be traced back to 1930s, the age of war. Today, the body rivet process is fully automatic, no presence of any worker, but only 335 stations of ABB robot arms busy around.

In the trim & final shop, we witnessed the automatic assembling process of amounting the panoramic sunroof onto the car body, and were attracted by the AGV transportation robots. These seemingly trivial AGV “ants” have guaranteed the high efficient production takt.

The last stop of the tour is the powertrain shop which was opened 2 months ago and produces “Ingenium” engine. We see how those small components are formed to be the “heart” of a vehicle. It is known that the ability of engine manufacturing more or less reflects the capability of an auto factory. The assembled “Ingenium” engine will be used in various JLR vehicles. From this point, it certainly proves that this factory deserves the name of “Global Model Factory”.

After the shop tour, the president of CJLR, Mr. Murray Dietsch, and VP Mr. Chris Chen, chaired the communication with students. The high level reception represents that CJLR values this visit. Murray shared the knowledge of CJLR’s car models and the manufacturing philosophy behind them. and Chris shared the experience of how to manage a JV “marriage” and elaborated how the relationship transformed from a simple JV to Win-Win cooperation. The belief of innovation and building new cooperation mechanism are the essence of the management of CJLR and also for this communication. In the Q&A section, students proposed various questions to Murray and Chris, and discussed the management practices in JV.

From “Intelligent Manufacturing” to “Wisdom Management”, through the short half day’s visit, students’ curiosity and thirst for knowledge has been satisfied and inspired further, and all enjoyed this journey of discovery.