Your company has decided that automated manufacturing is the most economical way for your organization to reduce production costs and increase your production throughput. So what are some basic steps that you can take to get the process of designing automation into your manufacturing? You should rely on your most immediate resources to start this process. The employees in your company have the most detailed information about the way that your current manufacturing operation is designed to work. Your employees, both hourly and management, are the best starting point for the most reliable information about how you should build automated manufacturing into your business.
Management should review the current manufacturing operations that are available for automated manufacturing. The initial production line that should be selected for upgrade to automation should be as simple as possible. It may be difficult for your organization to try to automate a very complex manufacturing operation at the beginning of automation. It would be best during the learning process to perform analysis and design for the simplest manufacturing operation available. Choosing may not be an option. If you can choose, the simpler line will help in understanding the automated manufacturing requirements and help later to tackle more difficult operations later.
Once the production line that is a candidate for automated manufacturing is selected, the next task to be done is to form a design team that will be able to evaluate the individual functions of the line and automate this operation. The team should have at least one member that is from the production staff, preferably the line production supervision. These members will have “hands-on” management experience with the manufacturing operation and will be able to give guidance from the management and operational prospective to create the automated manufacturing. Also included in this team should be at least one hourly shift worker from each of the shifts that have experience working on this production line. Each shift should be represented because there may be some variation in the actual production work done on the line on any given shift, even though the production line is the same. A representative of the production planning group should be a part of this team. Production planning lays out the production work flow that goes through this production line, so their expertise will be useful. There needs to be a member of this team that works with computer aided design to document functions and processes in a graphical way as the team does its work. Also a member of the safety department that is responsible for the safety regulations for this production department should be on the team.
With the design team for automated manufacturing in place, each work element on the production line should be reviewed by each member of the team. The detail of this step is very important in that each member of the team should write detail notes about the elements that are currently performed at each work station on the production line. Industrial engineering could possibly give some insight into actual work elements that are required at each work station on the production line. The notes that are made by each team member will invariably have some variation based on the viewpoint of the team member that is writing them. However, some consensus must be reached by the team as to the actual elements that make up the work done at each station in the automated manufacturing scenario. The team can disregard any time standards that may have been put in place by industrial engineering for work stations on the current line. Only the required elements of each work station operation must be determined. After the work tasks are defined and agreed upon by the members of the team, the graphic designer should layout the value stream map of the entire production line to begin the first phase of automated manufacturing.
Using the value stream map each work element at each work station on the production line should be timed for each shift. The values are then averaged to determine a current average process time for each work station. If there are any change over tasks done between actual unit production at any given work station and the start of the unit production at the next work station, those tasks should be timed and averaged as well for each shift. The values for these times should be added to the value stream map. The number of employees involved with the unit production at each work station should be recorded for each shift. This should be a constant from shift to shift, if the production job is the same on each shift.
A value stream map was created with the information that was gathered by a fictitious design team for automated manufacturing. This represents the work stations on a production line that produces stobors, fictitious parts that are part of a sub-assembly that will become part of several fictitious finished products. A stobor is a metal tube that has a polished surface, which will become part of a sub-assembly. The production line makes each stobor from tubing stock that is received from an outside supplier. The design team has gathered data from the two work stations, cutting and polishing, on our fictitious production line.
The first work station is cutting, where each part is cut from long lengths of tubing. The supplier delivers the raw material in lengths that are long enough to make 20 parts. The cycle time for cutting of these parts is 30 seconds. There is no change over time for at this work station. The cutting requires 6 employees, 3 material loaders and 3 material unloaders on each of 3 shifts. This work station utilizes 2 cutting machines to do the work. All parts are placed into a buffer area for the polish work station once cutting is complete. This area takes up 200 square feet of space in the factory area. This buffer usually contains about 7,000 parts that represents about 3 days of input for the next work station. Sometimes there is too much output from the cutting workstation and there is not enough room in the polish buffer area, so the overflow amount is placed in inventory in the warehouse.
The cycle time for the polishing work station is 2 minutes. Change over time for this work station between cycles is 5 minutes. The work station is run during 2 shifts and uses 4 employees, 2 tube polishers and 2 material unloaders. There are 2 polishing machines at the work station. A buffer are for the sub-assembly production line has been set up to hold 800 parts. This occupies 100 square feet of factory space and will hold 2 days of production input for the sub-assembly production line. The remainder of parts coming from the polishing work station are sent directly to inventory for use in production later. More on the continuation of this process later.
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