Jul 6, 2018
About the Customer
Our Industries eXcellence division recently completed a successful project delivering Manufacturing Plant Simulation support for a leading American industrial tool company. The customer is a top global manufacturer of industrial tools, household tools, security products and locks. Our Simulation experts were brought in to help the manufacturer design and develop a standard plant simulation template that would be easy-to-use and adaptable across their different plants worldwide.
The Customer's Need
When our team was brought into this initiative, the customer had already deployed Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation in some of their production plants. Given that many of their assembly cells and pack cells were almost cookie-cutter versions of each other, after a thorough review of requirements and close collaboration with the customer, our team of consultants deemed that creating a global template was both the most rapid and most cost-effective way to expand their implementation across multiple facilities.
About the Project
The first step in the project was to define the end goal, specific deliverables and a realistic timeline to achieve them. Our structured approach and an agreed upon end goal helped stakeholders on both sides of the project maintain focus, stay accountable and not creep in scope. The customer’s drive was to enable their end users to leverage the capabilities of Plant Simulation to help assist during their Kaizen events, which focus on specific cells and aim to determine the most effective improvements to be made in the shortest period of time.
Before the template was designed, a comprehensive analysis of each plant and cell was recorded. For example, say the customer wanted to focus on Assembly Cell #1 and utilize Plant Simulation during Kaizen events for that cell. The first step was to get an idea of the “best” and “worst” case scenarios, meaning to find the extremes of that cell. Sample questions that were asked include:
- What is the maximum and minimum number of operations across Assembly Cell #1?
- What is the maximum and minimum number of workers across Assembly Cell #1?
- How is the production schedule defined? Day? Week? Month?
- Are there any unique scenarios that only happen at Assembly Cell #1?
- What variables should the end user be able to manually enter and/or define for Assembly Cell #1? Cycle times? Operations? Operators? Worker efficiency?
Many questions then focusing on how each assembly cell's limitations would affect other locations and as a result the model itself were also explored. The goal was then to design and develop a global template that covered all possible scenarios across all of the customer’s plants.
After the template was created, the final step was helping the customer build custom analysis reports to provide the most relevant statistics and performance data on their production lines. For example, the customer requested ways to understand throughput per cell, throughput per hour per cell, buffer quantity (WIP), on-hand inventory/product and final product throughput. Based on this data, the customer could then better evaluate and make decisions about changes to implement in order to improve their lines and processes.
Engineering’s Advantage
After a 5-week effort, our Simulation team built a detailed Plant Simulation template that will now be implemented across the manufacturer’s different plants. The global template will provide the customer’s end users a quick and easy way to analyze and evaluate processes occurring on the manufacturing floor, even with minimal software experience. As a result, the customer will be able to better determine bottlenecks, evaluate KPIs & OEE data, and improve throughput across the enterprise.
