You'd be forgiven for thinking that you'd stumbled into the domain of the Borg in the first section of the IVECO Daily plant in Valladolid in Spain. Men and women wielding welding guns that appeared to be part of them. Sparks fizzing around window and door-panel sub-assemblies, and a robotic repetition of actions by the human workers that was simply setting the stage for the real robot performances later.

Don't get me wrong. This is not a dehumanised place. Some 770 assembly workers at the plant turn steel pressings, engines, wiring, and paint into around 32,000 IVECO vans and small truck cabs every year.

But really, apart from when they take their midday break - apparently more for a smoke and a rest from the noise than for food - it does seem that the workers become machines themselves. The real robots, of course, don't smoke. And the real people smile.

There's a commercial vehicle building tradition in this city 200 kilometres north-east of Madrid that goes back to the 1950s. Indeed, some of the people working on the modern assembly line at Valladolid represent the third generation of their families in this work.

Prior to IVECO taking over the plant site in 1991 there were names that in a vanman's memory are almost legends. SFNA. BMC. Berliet. ENASA. Now the 262,380 sq m factory has state of the art bodybuilding, painting and final assembly operations which supply commercial vehicles to France, Spain, Britain, Portugal and 'Others', in that order. Ireland is in that last 'others'.

CV sales throughout Europe are falling at the moment. And reflecting that, the IVECO plant in Valladolid has lost 12 days' production so far this year, to keep pace with declining orders, which every other brand is experiencing too. That kind of production stoppage must really be a bad headache for the management of a factory like IVECO's, where not just the assembly itself has to be interrupted, but also the deliveries from suppliers who - depending on what components they're providing
have to work on a just-in-time (JIT) basis of eight hours, three hours and even 30 minutes.

The robots probably don't mind. They don't have to put food on the table. For the workers, it's a day's pay gone. But then, there are some 200 assembly workers less there now than were a few years ago, partly due to just that roboticisation. The productivity figures tell part of the story: in 1999 the factory produced 23.47 vehicles per worker, today that figure is 37.

Among the results of the investment in recent years is a completely automated system of welding the roof on vans, where a group of robots can do some 2,000 welds in as short a time as 35 seconds, all to an unfailingly high degree of accuracy. This MASCARON robot system cost $4 million.

The already highly-automated paint shop, which does no less than 11 'dips' to clean, prepare and prime-coat bodies before the first 'bake' prior to full final painting is also being further upgraded this year. That said, there is still a high human content in parts of the paint area, including the spraying of the PVC underbody protection and the painting of places which the robots don't easily reach.

And watching the workers here, wearing the equivalent of bio-hazard suits for a 40-hour week, one has to conclude that it must be the biggest bummer of a job in the world. As a matter of interest, an average of 50 kgs of paint is applied to every IVECO Daily van.

The seriously fascinating bit is in the final assembly area, where there are parallel lines moving along for chassis and body, and at the beginning of which the final orders are made about the engines, sizes and formats, so that at the end, coming from separate overhead gantries, both bits are 'married'. If someone has screwed up (computers don't, after all) on their keyboard, this is where it will all fall apart.

My most abiding memory of the whole plant comes from this point, where - as the body section was being lowered to the chassis - I could see through the gap an operative with a steering wheel in his hands, waiting for his chance to jump in and fix this most essential component.

Moments later, as another guy (maybe there were two?) underneath the whole thing bolted body and chassis together, a woman worker spun a few bolts into the inside righthand doorframe, then scampered to the back to toss the the spare wheel into the van. I figured it was somebody else's job further down the line to bolt it in place, because she ran forward again to do something in the bonnet area.

Quality control is probably one of the most important issues with the manufacture of any vehicle today, car or commercial. At Valladolid they have a 'metallurgy room' where they bring a side panel (the jargon is a 'lateral') a day and a full vehicle a week for extremely precise computerised inspection of tolerances. In addition, five vehicles a week are taken at random from the end of the line and tested over a 200 km road circuit. And at every section of the assembly, the workers are organised in groups with a Team Leader and each team takes charge of its own quality control.


This level of control has paid off well: since 1999 the rate of faults per vehicle discovered in-factory has dropped from 140 to 30.

At Valladolid, the production process today depends on external suppliers for around half of the components used. The successful running of the plant is very dependent on the quality of the relationship with the ‘partners' including, for instance, the paint producers and axle suppliers.

A significant amount of the components come from outside Spain, including Italy and France. Matters outside the company's control, such as a lightning transport strike in France, have the potential to severely disrupt production. While the company keeps about three days' supply of basic needs on site, there have been instances when its own transport had to be sent outside Spain's border to bring back components to keep things moving.

The Borg doesn't like to be stopped. Even the one that smiles ...