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november 16, 2015 - Renault

Palencia launches fourth-generation Mégane

Busy times for Renault’s Palencia plant in Spain, with Kadjar and New Mégane launched within six months.

Spain has long held strategic industrial importance for Groupe Renault, which has four Spanish production facilities, in Valladolid (Captur, Twizy and engines), Sevilla (gearboxes) and Palencia (Mégane, Kadjar). From 2014 to 2016, Renault will be investing €600 million to upgrade its plant here and meet the most demanding quality requirements.

Two vehicles with a common modular architecture (CMF C/D)

This year, 2015, has been a pivotal year for Renault’s Palencia site, located 240 kilometres north-west of Madrid. After starting volume production of Renault’s successful #crossover Kadjar in the spring, after its maiden appearance at the 2015 Geneva Motor Show, the site is following through with launch of New Mégane, unveiled at the Frankfurt Motor Show in September. A third production shift (the night shift, which had been discontinued in late 2011) has been reinstated to meet high demand for Kadjar, and the Palencia workforce has more than doubled in the last eighteen months, from 1,900 to 4,200.

The Palencia site has built its reputation around production of successive generations of Mégane, and stands as the benchmark site for this kingpin of the Renault range, more than four million units of which have been made here since 1995. New Mégane follows hot on the heels of Kadjar, and both cars are based on the Renault-Nissan Alliance’s new modular architecture, CMF C/D. The ambitious twin launch programme would entail factory-wide transformation, extending to people, machinery and processes.

Challenge: the Renault manufacturing excellence plan

Palencia had already begun the transformation in the wake of the Spanish competitive performance agreements signed in late 2012, a crucial factor in the plant’s being assigned with production of these new models. With production volumes on the rise, the Renault manufacturing excellence plan takes on even greater relevance as a crucial challenge for the Palencia facility. The plan’s four key points are: excellence in working practice, productivity, supplier strategy and labour relations performance.

To boost performance and competitiveness, Palencia took up the Alliance Production Way (APW) in early 2015, along with the other Renault and Nissan facilities. The APW is derived from best practices across the Renault and Nissan production systems, and one of the things it specifies is production synchronized to customer demand, for quality and compliance with leadtimes. This requires faultless synchronization with suppliers, in flows and performance, through tightly optimized schedule management.

Another key point involved in adaptation to production ramp-up is personnel training. In 2014, training at the facility totalled 42 hours per person, a figure that would double with arrival of the two new models. All the people working on Kadjar and New Mégane would be offered a thorough skills enhancement programme covering the new products themselves, plus topics including safety, quality, perceived quality and dexterity.

Upgrades to sheet metal, paintwork and assembly shops

Three areas of the Palencia facility underwent particularly substantial upgrades to adapt to take-up of the two new models.

A new sheet metal shop, an atmosphere of a plant of Future

Judging from the colour and the lighting, the Palencia sheet metal shop could easily be something out of a plant of Future, with its brand new orange and black robots and auto-guided vehicles (AGVs) running along the wide alleys. The strings are pulled by a workforce of 800, and there are 874 robots in operation.

New vehicle chassis plant with 250 high-tech robots was set up in the Main Floor area to accommodate arrival of Kadjar and New Mégane. There are 70 new robots on the new body side assembly line, the Nissan Standard Line (NSL). The existing door and bonnet lines have been adapted through carry-over upgrades to more than 70 robots.

Perceived quality is a key factor, as we see at the “Weld Dojo”, a workshop area containing a car body, on which operators learn to distinguish compliant from non-compliant welds. For further improvements in perceived quality, Palencia also invested in a laser weld system for the roof-body fit.

2

Light booth for paintwork quality

After Maubeuge (Kangoo, Kangoo ZE and Citan) and Douai (New Espace, Talisman and Scénic), Palencia is the third Renault plant to bring in a light booth, a new inspection system developed by the Process Engineering and Design team on the basis of experience shared with Daimler.

The grey-walled booth emits standardized reference light, the intensity and orientation of which enables operators to spot very minor colour differences, and thereby check colour harmony between body parts painted at the plant and those brought in from outside suppliers, for further improvement in perceived quality. On New Mégane, the doors are painted in the Palencia paint shop, the bumper in another shop at Palencia, and the hatch at an outside supplier’s plant.

The light booth is the central feature of a very thorough quality inspection plan; twenty vehicles are sampled from the production line every week to undergo meticulous scrutiny using a colour standard to assess colour harmony and an aspect standard (new to the process this year) to detect pocking.

Because perceived quality is a key factor in plant performance, Palencia set up a Perceived Quality School for production release of Kadjar and New Mégane. This new unit provides classroom and hands-on training for all personnel working on the new vehicles.

Assembly line adapted to CMF C/D modular architecture
Kadjar and New Mégane are based on the Renault-Nissan Alliance’s new modular architecture, CMF C/D

(for “Common Module Family”), much like New Espace and Talisman (built at the Douai plant in France).

With a modular architecture, different vehicles share inter-compatible subsystems not visible to the customer, with the attendant cost rationalization advantages. Specifically, this concerns the engine compartment, cockpit, front under-body unit, rear under-body unit and electrical and electronic subsystems.

Aspects visible to the customer, on the other hand, are highly diverse. At the Palencia assembly line, with its large “S” shape specially adapted to the dimensions of the new cars, operators have to manage very extensive diversity in vehicle equipment and the workstations to handle them. Examples include the 4Control system, available on New Mégane GT, four-wheel drive, available on Kadjar, and a broad choice of wheels, with a parts counts that approaches a hundred different items.

Full-kitting is being phased in gradually, for optimized management of component diversity, given that the total parts count has doubled (to 4,500). The idea is to bring full part kits, matching the assembly film, up as close as possible to the operator at the assembly line. This improves workstation ergonomics (since it requires fewer transfers and motions), safety (since there is less truck traffic), quality, and overall plant performance.

One hundred percent of vehicles undergo appearance and functionality tests as they come off the production line, prior to dynamic testing on an outdoor test track. 

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