MAN Truck & Bus
Mission
MAN Truck & Bus AG offers to its customers the service of configuring their trucks individually, which leads to a high complexity in the assembly line. 120 and 160 different models per day are produced with a wide spread of workload. Our goal was to implement a web-based application for short-term dynamic staff assignment and line balancing that depicts the high complexity in the sequenced production lines and guarantees a consistently optimum realtime planning and steering of personnel capacity.
Solution and Work Process
We developed the a simulation-based application, here are the working steps:
KPI system which depicts and evaluates the various levels of sequenced production lines
Conception of a method and customized solution for dynamic line balancing in the short-term category
Implementation of a web-based planning application which depicts the production system and its assembly processes dependent on the respective variants and periodically accesses current process time and sequence data
Data processing: to get the data in the right aggregation and combination
People engagement by training and coaching in the transformation process until the planners mastered the new system
Results
A new dynamism in planning was installed as real time simulation. It enabled the planners to play out a wide variety of production scenarios and their effects and to optimize in advance, by simulating future flexible deployment of personnel. The short-term results are:
Full transparency regarding staff under-utilization and bottlenecks
18 % productivity increase (Full Cost equivalent of one vehicle per day)
Significant increase in planning reliability in complex production environments
80 % Cost reduction for Planning and adjustment for EURO 6 Introduction
95 % planning accuracy in operational business even in ramp-up scenarios