Oct 13, 2015
About the Customer
Engineering’s Product Lifecycle Management team has just begun an exciting new project for a large Aerospace & Defense manufacturer. The customer operates a leading aircraft, engine and components repair service center. The customer engaged Engineering to help them initiate a continuous improvement project. The customer was looking to better understand and analyze their throughput and bottlenecks with regards to their manufacturing process for a critical flight component. The customer needed to execute this analysis with minimal or no impact on the actual production process. To accomplish this, Engineering leveraged a Siemens solution from the Tecnomatix suite called Plant Simulation. Plant Simulation allowed Engineering to virtually model the customer’s entire process and analyze complex “what if” scenarios to better understand constraints and potential optimizations.
About the Project
To start this analysis, Engineering conducted several alignment workshops with the customer. During these workshops, Engineering walked through what pieces of data would be needed in order to generate an accurate model. This data includes historical records on operation times, physical layouts of the machines, transportation times, and delay information. The Engineering team then went out to the shop floor and walked through the entire process to verify that the information provided by the customer was accurate.
This customer’s process was discovered to be extremely complex due to the highly variable nature of their manufacturing activities. Almost all of the 66 manufacturing operations found on the routing for this component were optional. This meant that for every manufacturing run, there were thousands of potential paths the part could follow before reaching a final state. Each one of these options were analyzed to understand what percentage chance it had to follow that path. This information was critical in determining an accurate model of the customer’s process. Another important factor that was analyzed by the Engineering team was the delay information. Every manufacturing facility experiences common problems, as well as its own set of unique issues. The Engineering team, speaking with various engineers and supervisors, as well as reviewing historical information, was able to determine a detailed analysis of the delays found at this site. The types of issues, along with how long on average they occur, the working areas affected, as well as how they affect the aerospace component, were documented. This information alone was a valuable output of the project.
Once Engineering had a good understanding of the process, the team turned to reviewing the people component. Further studies were conducted with the customer to understand the number of workers, shifts, roles, and responsibilities at the site. Knowing this data allowed Engineering to also account for the human factor element. After all the data was collected, the Engineering team then began generating the model. The starting point for this was importing an existing CAD drawing of the facility into Plant Sim. This CAD drawing allowed the team to build components on top of the shop floor layout. The team then started to virtually build the plant, its work centers, and all possible operations that could take place for this component at each step in the routing. All of the data collected during the analysis was added, leveraging standard components the product offers. In a relatively short period, the team was able to accurately model the facility.
The Results
Having an accurate model of a manufacturing facility offers endless possibilities in analyzing performance. By taking advantage of the analysis tools found within Plant Sim, the team was able to identify various bottlenecks throughout the process. Many constraints were identified by looking at equipment, human resources, and delays. The optimizations to these constraints were done using genetic algorithm utilities within the software which allows for “what if” scenarios to be run. This allows for quick answers to questions such as, “What happens if I move these machines closer?”, “What will be the impact of hiring 2 more workers?”, and “How many more parts can I produce if I buy another machine?” Not to mention the fact that testing the model and being able to see parts virtually move around the facility, with workers going to and from stations, is a really interesting and exciting aspect of working with Plant Sim.
At the end of the project, the Engineering team trained the customer on using the working model so they would be able to simulate their own “what if” scenarios. The value gained from the results were extremely beneficial, helping the customer make important investment decisions for their 5-year roadmap strategy. Engineering is currently in discussions with the customer on helping them expand the model to encompass more areas of the plant.
