First and second year LMH PPE students, accompanied by Tutors Natalie Quinn and Ruth Tarrant, had an exciting and informative tour of the BMW MINI factory in Cowley on Thursday of 0th week as part of their economics courses.
LMH PPE students during their tour of the Mini Factory in Oxford.
LMH Lecturer in Economics Ruth Tarrant reports:
"After exploring the visitor centre with its historical collection of MINIs and learning about MINI's global supply chains and global market, we donned safety specs and hi-vis jackets, and were guided around the body shop by former shop-floor employees. The body shop was "manned" by 1,300 hi-tech robots and very few workers. The space was vast and noisy but beautiful in a Terminator-movie sense! Having originally thought that we would struggle to connect Philosophy to our PPE trip, we also learned about the use of Logic in the robotics programming, alongside the Just-In-Time approach used by BMW.
After admiring the new paint colours designed by BMW's marketing team (and deciding that a Canary Yellow car might attract a bit too much attention on the road!), we moved onto the Final Assembly building. This looked much more like the typical car factory that we might expect, with a moving assembly line, and workers beavering away to finish each task in a precise 67 seconds. Less traditionally, autonomous vehicles were on the move continuously, delivering essential parts to cars at just the right time on the assembly line. As we moved around this building, the cars really began to take shape, and we saw several finished MINIs roll off the assembly line after completing their final tests.
The trip was a great way for first and second year PPE-ists to get to know each other a bit better, and to build strong foundations for the models of production, growth and trade that we'll be studying over the course of the year. Our grateful thanks go to the College's Academic Office, whose staff worked hard to ensure that we could have such a fun trip."
