Magna Assamstadt
How a mirror plant is working against deindustrialisation
To understand what the much-cited major transformation really means for the automotive industry, a factory visit is always worthwhile. At Magna's Assamstadt plant, all facets of the challenges can be observed as if under a magnifying glass.
Magna is one of the heavyweights of the global automotive industry. According to its own figures, the North American supplier generated around US$42 billion in revenue in 2025, operates 330 production and assembly plants worldwide and employs more than 156,000 employees. The company ranks first in North America by revenue and third among automotive suppliers worldwide. Its customer base reads like a cross-section of the global automotive industry. General Motors accounted for 16 per cent of global revenue in 2025, Mercedes-Benz for 15 per cent, Ford and BMW each for 12 per cent, Volkswagen and Stellantis each for 11 per cent.
Other customers accounted for 23 per cent. All the more tranquil and unspectacular the site appears where a remarkable transformation story is taking place. Assamstadt, a town with around 2,000 inhabitants between Würzburg and Heilbronn, is likely to be hardly known even to many industry insiders. But a look behind the factory gates of Magna's Assamstadt site shows exemplarily the challenges facing the European supplier industry and how individual plants are responding to them.
For the story of the plant is not a classic success story in the sense of typical Industry 4.0 lighthouses. Rather, it begins with a situation that numerous automotive suppliers in Europe know only too well. Increasing cost pressure, growing global competition and the question of how production can be made competitive in the long term in a high-wage country. The plant in Assamstadt, which specialises in door mirrors, also found itself at this point a few years ago.
Those responsible had to realign the site, fundamentally question processes and put competitiveness to the test. That the plant is now regarded as one of the so-called 'Lighthouse Plants' within the Magna Group was anything but self-evident at the time.
Anyone who walks through the halls for several hours and speaks with those responsible gains the impression that the site's actual achievement does not lie in individual robots, automated guided vehicles or AI applications. What stands out instead is the consistency with which those responsible have worked on a shared vision over many years. Our visit reveals with what consistency and structured approach the team around Group General Manager Mirrors Germany, Andreas Buhl, is trying to keep production in Germany competitive even under difficult framework conditions.
Nobody in Assamstadt claims that this has solved the challenges. The automotive industry remains volatile, supply chains are fragile, geopolitical conflicts influence raw material flows and sales markets. Nobody here dares to make reliable long-term forecasts either. But while factory closures, job cuts and relocations are being discussed in parts of the industry, Magna in Assamstadt is deliberately pursuing a different path.
The plant is increasingly focusing on automation, digitalisation, more value creation in-house and above all on greater speed in adapting to new framework conditions.
From mirror to electronic system
Around 480 people work here on a production area of 24,700 square metres. In Assamstadt, exterior mirrors, painted mirror housings and antenna covers are manufactured. The competencies range from plastic injection moulding to painting and assembly. For this, there are 29 injection moulding machines, two robotised painting systems and twelve assembly lines available. However, the pure product description does not go far enough.
The exterior mirror has long ceased to be a simple component that merely enables the view to the rear. Modern mirrors are complex mechatronic systems. They carry cameras, sensors, lights, heaters, actuators and, depending on the version, further functions. Martin Müller, Advanced Assistant General Manager, describes the change as follows: “It is no longer just about purely looking back.” Depending on the version, several cameras, lighting systems and further electrical consumers can be integrated. “We currently have up to three cameras in the exterior mirror,” says Müller. That explains why an apparently small component creates a surprisingly high level of complexity in production.
Data as the basis of every decision
Right at the entrance to production, it becomes visible what importance data now has. This is where the managers meet daily in front of a digital control wall. Around 42 key figures are analysed here. Instead of static whiteboards or printed Excel tables, live data is available that can be broken down to individual production lines. Deviations are analysed immediately, escalation topics discussed and “we can interpret very quickly, but also initiate countermeasures directly,” says Buhl.
Transparency does not end at management level. Similar KPI boards can be found in the individual production areas. Plastic manufacturing, painting, logistics and assembly work with the same logic. Problems are made visible locally and at the same time escalated to the higher level. The digitalisation is intended above all to increase the speed of reaction. Whereas in the past information was available with a delay, today system conditions, production volumes or quality deviations can be tracked almost in real time.
The plastics production is particularly impressive. A total of 29 injection-moulding machines with clamping forces of 75 to 900 tonnes produce the housings and components for the mirrors at a later stage. Above the machines, robots move that automatically remove, weigh and transport the components onwards. Some systems already package the parts fully automatically.
What is striking here is the high degree of automation. While in many injection-moulding plants numerous employees are moving between the machines, some halls in Assamstadt appear almost empty. Per shift, only six people work across all three plastics halls. Depending on the production area, a single employee often supervises three to five machines at the same time. Where quality inspections or reworking are required, people still intervene directly in the process.
These activities too are intended to be further automated in future, where sensible. “We are moving towards highly automated processes”, says Buhl. In doing so, automation is not understood exclusively as a staffing issue. Rather, tasks are shifting. Equipment operators are becoming process monitors, quality specialists or specialists for the control of automated systems.
The intelligent warehouse as the centrepiece
The actual special feature of the plant, however, is found not in injection moulding, but in intralogistics. Between production and assembly, Magna operates an automated warehouse system that today is regarded as one of the showpiece projects of the site. Eight automated guided vehicles take over pallets, store them and supply production with material again. People hardly enter the actual warehouse area any more.
The vehicles move autonomously through the hall and stack containers in multiple layers. The route to this was unusual. Buhl explains that the plant initially found no suitable provider within the traditional automotive industry. The responsible parties therefore looked to solutions from other industries, including the textile industry, where automated singling and packing from containers was already widespread.
After extensive simulations and a planning phase lasting more than a year, the system finally went into series production. Today the intelligent warehouse manages around 28,000 storage locations and processes around 1,300 movements per hour.
Particularly complex - also in the supplier sector - is the paint shop. Around 40,000 mirror caps and plastic parts pass through the two systems every day. The components are cleaned, primed, coated with base coat and then covered with clear coat. Four robots take care of the painting in a zigzag process. Colour changes take place within less than a minute. Despite this high degree of automation, the paint shop remains one of the most demanding processes in the plant. More than 200 parameters influence quality. Temperature, humidity, material properties and numerous other factors act on the result at the same time.
Previously, these values were checked at fixed intervals. Today they are recorded continuously digitally and linked with quality data. “Previously we had the parameters every hour. Now we receive them digitally every second”, says Assistant General Manager Jose Luis De Mena. The benefit is apparent immediately. Instead of only discovering faults at the end of the line, employees can intervene during the process already.
The responsible parties compare this with a video assistant referee in football. Causes become visible, instead of merely identifying symptoms. This is particularly decisive in painting because small deviations in temperature, humidity or material flow could trigger visible quality problems, according to De Mena.
AI plans the sequence of orders
Magna goes even further in production planning. The sequence of paint orders used to be created manually by employees. Today, an AI-supported system takes on this task. It simultaneously takes different objectives into account. The number of colour changes is to decrease, inventories are to remain low and the systems are to be utilised as evenly as possible. “We have reduced our colour changes by approximately half and thereby saved a great deal of material,” explains the Spaniard De Mena.
This saves material, shortens downtime and improves the efficiency of painting. The application exemplifies how Industry 4.0 is understood in Assamstadt. The focus is not on spectacular pilot projects, but on concrete improvements to existing processes. AI is used there where it can actually make a measurable contribution. In this case, it is about planning decisions in which many factors have to be taken into account simultaneously and in which human experience reaches its limits.
At the same time, the tour makes it clear that not every activity can be automated. This is particularly visible in the loading of the painting racks and in assembly. In painting, employees must place numerous differently shaped components onto special carriers within a few minutes. Each mirror generation has its own geometries. The cycle times are high, the movements complex.
“Despite numerous investigations, we have so far been unable to find an economically viable automation solution for this,” explains Martin Müller. It is similar in assembly. Here, wiring harnesses, cameras, lights and drives are integrated into the mirrors. Many components are located in different positions depending on the variant. While screwdriving processes are automated and end-of-line tests are carried out entirely in automated test stations, laying cables remains manual work. The female employees must grasp small components, route lines and make plug connections. This requires dexterity, experience and concentration.
Women dominate the assembly lines
It is striking in this area that the majority of those working on the assembly lines are women. Those responsible explain this by the particular fine motor skills required for many tasks. Handling small components, cables and plug connections in particular requires precise work. Men are more frequently deployed in provisioning, transport or packaging.
The lines differ depending on the product and customer, but follow a similar basic principle. A total of twelve assembly lines are located in the hall. Processes that are repeatable with precision and standardised are automated, while tasks rich in variants and requiring fine motor skills continue to be carried out by people. The finished mirrors are then tested in a screened end-of-line inspection. There, the system checks functions such as camera, light and folding mechanism.
The high variety of variants characterises the entire site. Colour, camera equipment, lighting functions, drives and customer-specific versions mean that individual programmes can comprise thousands of article numbers. "This diversity that we have in products has to be experienced," emphasises Müller. Production therefore does not take place in the final customer sequence, but in batches. The sequence is only created later in the intelligent warehouse. After assembly, the mirrors return there.
The system automatically retrieves the correct mirrors and caps. Employees assemble the components in accordance with the OEM sequence and prepare them for shipping. Inventories remain low. According to those responsible, there are often only a few days between production and delivery. Parts that are painted today can be installed on an OEM vehicle line just a few days later.
The leadership trio around Buhl does not tire of emphasising that automation in Assamstadt is not necessarily linked to a decline in employment. On several occasions, those responsible point out that additional value-creation steps were deliberately brought back into the plant. Processes that were previously handled by external service providers are now carried out internally. At the same time, Magna is trying to assemble or process further components itself in order to increase the depth of value creation.
One example of this is the assembly of certain mirror components, in which Magna continues to source individual parts from suppliers, but takes over downstream work steps itself. The glass carrier plate can be moulded at the site, other components such as heating films or special glass come from outside. The assembly is then mapped in the plant in an automated or partially automated way. In this way, additional value creation and additional tasks are created at the site.
In this lies a central point of the Assamstadt strategy. Automation is intended not only to reduce costs, but also to enable activities that could hardly be brought back to Germany without automation. This distinguishes the site from a purely rationalisation project. The logic is not to do less, but to be able to achieve more economically in-house.
The smart factory as a continuous task
After three hours in the plant, one impression above all remains: The smart factory in Assamstadt is not a static concept, but a plant in constant change. Many processes already run highly automated. Other areas are still surprisingly strongly characterised by manual work. It is precisely this contrast that makes the site interesting. While driverless transport systems organise thousands of movements per hour and AI creates paint plans, employees a few metres further on inspect mirror caps by hand or lay wiring harnesses.
The factory of the future, so the impression goes, is being created through hundreds of decisions along the entire value chain. It is about data capture, autonomous logistics, automated inspection processes, AI-supported planning, more ergonomic workplaces and the sober question of which activity will also in future be better carried out by people. Assamstadt provides an unusually honest insight into this. The plant shows how difficult it is to keep industrial production in Germany competitive. But it also shows that it is possible if a site consistently questions its processes, accepts technological limits and nevertheless keeps working on them.
