PULSING REAL TIME FACTORY
Our customer is facing a highly competitive market with low margins. The automotive company is a market leader and masters perfectly the lean methods and philosophy. Nevertheless, the management wanted to improve the performance in the final assembly line. We are very proud to announce, that beginning of this month the project team succeeded in making a real time factory pulse every second live. The planning system can react to the current real data at any time, a bit like the nervous system of a person. With the help of AI and simulation-based technologies, we enable precise predictions and decision-making scenarios for individual plants or entire production networks.
From our point of view, “real time” has to enable “forward pulsing” planning and control down to the work step level, as well as directed at different levels and planning horizons:
Production plan services down to machine, person and work step via smart devices.
Optimization of the next shifts and working days / weeks via digital twin based on real data in real time. The optimization of productions takes place in advance of the release of the orders based on the S&OP planning. In case of unforeseen events, we reset and approve manufacturing and process alternatives within minutes.
Targeted improvement of the quality of the planning data takes place continuously. We will be launching a new technology for dynamic data optimization on the market in the next few months.
With the introduction of our Production Optimization module for dynamic staff assignment and line balancing our customer is now able to react in real time, whenever a rescheduling is necessary, or a cycle time delay occurs.
How do we proceed to build up a real time plant? What are typical working steps?
Specification of real time staff planning and data requirements
Integration of work step sequences, formerly listed in Excel files, in our application
Realization of line balancing with drag & drop functionalities to move processes from one station to another
Automatic scheduling of tasks and interactive Gantt-Chart to visualize the staff assignments under consideration of qualification and process dependencies
Periodically rescheduling of task list depending on cycle time deviations and communication on tablets
Simulation results available in seconds, based on real time data availability
The critical success factor is a high data quality and availability to get transparency on planning data and to be able to profit from high benefits. These are benefits in the first step of optimization:
Reduction of cycle time deviation due to the lack of transparency from 12% to 0
Reduction of staff for optional processes by 25%
Reduction for staff planning from 5 hours (static planning) to 3 seconds (dynamic planning)
Especially in times of high fluctuations in the order and supply situation, the dynamic forward planning enables the resources to be used even more precisely and the performance of the value chain to be ensured. The high responsiveness makes the supply chain more robust.
