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The focus of this assignment is the comparison among the three simulations (batch of 8, batch of 4, and single price flow). While watching the 3 Story case movies provided, we needed to analyses and compare the differences among the three simulations. There are several elements to Just in time manufacturing that are crucial to the successful implementation of this new manufacturing. These elements are; Group technology, Process control quality, SIT, Uniform factory load, Pull through production and Set up production. Any activity that adds costs to a product that does to add value is a waste.
The simulations will be held with 3 types of colors, which are Red, Green and Black. The reason why this is a demonstration instead of a real life production process is because there is an accurate future forecast; Red 60%, Green 20% and Black 20%. Furthermore, this report will analyses the three simulations and make comparisons between these simulations. Batch of 8 While watching the first simulation which started with an introduction and the process flow of the coming production, they divided the processes into three work stations.
Furthermore, the customer will buy directly from a warehouse. There is a trucker and a maintenance worker available, the trucker will transport the material from one to the other work station, while the maintenance worker will step in when there occurs a malfunction of certain equipment used in the process. Initially, the first production run of the red rectangular Story foam block went very well. There didn’t occur any malfunctions in this run. The supply in the red blocks were sufficient to cope with the demand of the consumer. The first stock out occurred with the green foam blocks.
While there was a shortage of green, the second workstation continued to produce the red ones first. This eventually led to 2 stock outs in this process. When the second operator is going through a set-up, the first and third operators are continuing working. Furthermore, the customer also continues to consume. The second operator has now made its set up, so she could start again producing. In the meantime, the second operator is lacking in time to fulfill the customer demands. On the other hand, the third operator cannot continue due to the fact that the second operator is still behind schedule.
That is the reason why the third operator has been assigned to do work for the next month, or else she would be doing nothing which would result in waste. There is a significant unevenness in the work load of the work operators. It takes approximately 5 minutes and 1 second to finish the demanded products, this is defined as lead-time. Another problem within the process that occurred, was that certain products did not needs to be assessed and possibly removed. Finally, when comparing the end of the 8th batch with the beginning of the 4th batch there were some adjustments made by Story Inc.
The first element that has been changed is the set up time. Furthermore, the second and third workstation has been combined to one to reduce the unevenness, delays and transport time. This also led to a reduction of the production space. Batch of 4 In the second simulation the batches consist of 4 pieces instead of the 8 as in the first one. The entire productions space has been reduced because of the reduced slot size. For example, the working station “fixtures” could move to the general assembly line.
That has several advantages; the worker on the next work station does to have to wait until the whole batch is finished, but is able to already start to work on the next piece while the rest is still at the “fixture” working station. Another advantage is that for the transportation to and from this station is no trucker required anymore. The “Statistical Quality Control” was reorganized so that the quality control happens directly after station two and three. Therefore, there is an advantage that you do not have to put any further work into products which are already scrap.
One thing which is still working less efficient and could not be solved tit the lower batch sizes, is that workstation three is the bottleneck of the whole production. That means that the amount of products which wait before the station increases instantly as well as the following station had to wait for pieces because it works faster. However, the fact that one workstation is significantly slower than the rest leads to an overload for worker and machine at this station. That makes it difficult to maintain the machine regularly so that when it breaks down it only gets fixed in a makeshift manner.
Consequently, if the workstation is falling out, the shines at the other stations have an even longer standstill. To have a standstill is every time bad for the efficiency of a factory. Batch of 1; Single piece flow At the end of the second simulation they choose to remove the rubber band because it doesn’t add any value to the customer thus it was Just a waste of time for the manufacturers. In this third simulation, the production is adapted to the demand. They are Just producing by order. The first manufacturer waits for the order to start producing and the other manufacturers Just follows him.
In fact the roles of each manufacturer has changed, the first one is now taping to stick the two panels on the product. Then the second one is drawing two circles on the sides of the box. And the third one is filling the colors in the circles. Due to the multifunctional panels, they can reduce the set up time. In addition, the color schedule cards are not useful anymore because they use a fixed process for the coloring work. In fact the manufacturers are really closely related to each other and work in a fluent and quietly environment. Some products are damaged, they can directly remove them from the supply chain.
Furthermore, in this simulation there is far less transportation costs because they are working closely on only one single product. Therefore, they add value to the products without increasing the costs because they’ll be matching better to the customer demands. To conclude, This simulation is by far the best production method, due to the limited lead time of 10. 9 seconds. Furthermore, There haven’t occurred any stock outs and the whole process was running fluently. When some issues occurred, it was easy to remove them and the waste was reduced to a minimum.