BMW 2008 Annual Report Download - page 218

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“turbocharger” to drive improvements and constantly provide fresh momentum – thus
pre-empting predictable but inevitable price increases for resources and emissions.
Once you have a turbocharger like that up and running, there is no turning it off. And even
though the project’s goal of “minus  percent” is initially for a six-year period, its ambitions
stretch much further. “As a company we have set ourselves the goal of one day building
emission-free vehicles,” says Höltschl, “so of course we are also thinking about how we
can build those same vehicles emission-free.”
From that point of view, things are off to an ambitious start with a five percent optimisation
per year. But that is also just the beginning.
The automotive industry’s body pressing plants traditionally use tensile oil to make sheet
metal easier to process. This procedure inevitably releases tiny oil particles into the air,
making elaborate filtering necessary. However, production planners at the Leipzig plant
found a way to dispense with tensile oils altogether by using better tools and press panels.
This not only cut investments in ventilation systems by more than half, it also reduced
running expenses for ventilation and heating by no less than  percent.
To identify potential efficiencies of this kind in the early stages, and avoid often costly
modifications later on, the BMW Group’s environmental officers are consulted on all in-
vestment decisions near the outset. Plant managers have also made a binding commitment
to reduce resource consumption by an average of five percent per year. A global bench-
marking system allows all plant managers to see how well they are managing resources
at any time compared with other BMW Group sites. Most importantly, they can call upon
the experience and expertise of the best-performing location to help optimise their own
plant. In this way the BMW Group’s production network practically has its own built-in
Savings from lower resource consumption over the previous year
more than euro  million in 
The challenge of the future Topic four Profitability Clean Production