Dec 18, 2018
About the Customer
The customer is a multinational corporation headquartered in Ferguson, Missouri, United States. This Fortune 500 company manufactures products and provides engineering services for a wide range of industrial, commercial and consumer markets. Their main business divisions focus on manufacturing products for the monitoring & control, heating & air conditioning, refrigeration, sensing, protection and thermostat device sectors. For this project, our Industries eXcellence team worked with the customer's American division that manufactures and assembles air compressors.
The Customer’s Need
The customer is in the planning phase to deploy a new assembly line for air compressors in their Texas plant. Before moving forward with the implementation, however, the customer first wanted to evaluate the proposed layout and determine different options to maximize its production capacity while minimizing investment on assets.
Thanks to our long-standing experience delivering digital tools and systems to the Automotive & Heavy Equipment industrial sector, as well as a growing practice and team dedicated solely to manufacturing simulation technologies in North America, Engineering Industries eXcellence was brought in by the customer. After several meetings with the customer's team, we were able to demonstrate that we were the best partner to take up the task of building the simulation model in order to help the customer identify the optimal plant layout and achieve their business goals.
About the Project
Working closely with the customer to understand all requirements, our team of Manufacturing Simulation experts created a 3D simulation model of the proposed layout and ran different scenarios to identify the optimal number of pallets the line would need to operate without starving from the transportation system. The system included constraints such as downtimes across the stations and logic to prevent blocking at intersection points. The whole development was done using Siemens Tecnomatix Plant Simulation from our Digital Manufacturing portfolio. This project used a lot of out-of-the-box functionality, including the user interface, experiment manager and the capability to inherit properties through an object-oriented library.
Engineering’s Advantage
Before the project, the customer had estimated that their new line would require them to purchase approximately 30% more pallets than what the actual results of the simulation model determined to be needed to achieve the desired production results. Thanks to the different scenarios tested and evaluated, the customer now has full certainty of the production capacity required. In addition, the model discovered an oversized buffer in the plant’s rework areas; the simulation enabled the customer to identify this bottleneck and take action to get it under control. With the insights gained from this successful initiative, the customer can now confidently move forward with the implementation of their new line in a way that they know will minimize costs, improve efficiency, increase throughput and maximize financial gain for the business.
