Word: leipziger
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...flexibility also extends to the rhythm of work: BMW has struck deals with its heavily unionized workforce that enable it to run its factories more or less as demand dictates. Its newest plant in Leipzig, where the 3-series and new 1-series hatchback cars are built, runs anywhere from 60 to 140 hours per week. Instead of classic two- or three-shift rosters, the company juggles some 300 working-time permutations to determine optimal use of its teams of workers, some of whom are contract "permatemps" more common...
Drop in on BMW's Leipzig plant, and you can see what he means. It's the firm's newest, having opened just two years ago, with a luminous open-plan central building that houses white-collar workers and managers. It was designed by London-based architect Zaha Hadid, and its most striking feature is a conveyor belt that meanders inside the building just below roof level, carrying a steady stream of cars from the body shop to the paint shop. You can see it from almost everywhere in the building, including the cafeteria...
...changeover or addition. Several key suppliers are based in the plant, rather than in a nearby supplier park. Jörg Baumheuer says that makes for easy communication when problems arise. He's a manager at the French auto-parts firm Faurecia, which assembles cockpits and seats for BMW in Leipzig and some other plants. The advantage for Faurecia is that it doesn't need to truck in finished parts; it simply assembles them on the spot. That cuts inventories and improves speed and reliability; the firm needs just 20 minutes' notice to put together a customized cockpit. "It cuts...
Winning union approval for even greater flexibility was easier in Leipzig. In part, that's because other German automakers, particularly Volkswagen, were threatening to move some of their production outside Germany altogether because of high costs. In the end, the union agreed to extend working hours without extra pay. That has been a boon to the whole industry--and the German economy. Reithofer acknowledges that the wage restraint "has been a fundamental contribution to making Germany competitive again...
...established in a paper published in December in Science. Now a report in the American Naturalist explains just why Ebola is spreading among the animals so furiously--and shows how it could be stopped, according to lead author Peter Walsh of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The epidemiological tactics used to treat outbreaks of human scourges like E. coli hold the answer...