Swanson School of Engineering

Yesterday at Skoda, seeing the assembly line in action surprised me the most about automotive manufacturing. I’ve been in factories before, but I’ve never been in one this big or seen one using an assembly line with so much human labor and collaboration. The assembly line had strict goals for production for the day, and guidelines on how fast they should be working, which seemed to be no problem for them to meet and follow. I was surprised by how happy some of the employees looked and they seemed like they were having fun for what the job was. The entire interior of the assembly line part of the factory felt like a mini town and I was surprised by how organized everything was. They even had crosswalks and stoplights for people walking, robots, people driving machines, and sometimes people riding bikes to get around because of how big the factory was. I wasn’t expecting how cool the inside of the factory would be, and I was really surprised by the automation combined with human labor and how clean and organized everything in the factory was.