Mapping and improving the after sales flow in a high-tech assembly plant : A case study of the aftermarket at Saab Järfälla

Sammanfattning: This thesis report is the final element of the Master of Science degree in Industrial Design Engineering at Luleå University of Technology, conducted between January and September 2017 at Saab AB Surveillance in Järfälla, Sweden. The purpose of this thesis project was to analyze the current situation inside production of aftermarket products with an aim to create an extensive mapping of the current situation. Resulting in suggestions for improvements to stabilize the production and creating integration between the aftermarket and new production.   Products produced at Saab Järfälla are used in military defense applications where the larger systems in electronic warfare (EW) and countermeasure systems have very long life cycles, i.e. up to 40 years, and are being used in harsh environments. The products have to be maintained through various service agreements to include support with repairs, maintenance, supplies and transports between Saab and the client. One of these service agreements has a demanded net average lead time of N+12 days between Saab’s facilities and the client whereas N days inside the Järfälla production site. Mapping the situation and handling all the product information in a production with high-mix, low-volume characteristics have not been easy. The aftermarket processes inside Järfälla include diagnosing, reparation, assembling and testing to ensure the performance of the products. The aftermarket shares resources with the production of newly manufactured products which is one of the reasons creating a vast difference in the lead times standard deviation. Other reasons such as information handling, priority inference, flexibility issues and bad visual management has been the effect of causing delays in the production.   The thesis project has been conducted through a development process using various methods for mapping the current situation and to come up with new ideas to improve the situation. Starting with a search in available literature and research about HMLV production, aftermarket situations and lean principles, onto using well-known methods for analyzing such as value stream mapping, Ishikawa diagrams and data collection to form a requirement specification for the upcoming solutions.   As a result, in the analysis of the current state, the fact that the processes itself works almost flawlessly shows that causes for delays and lack of stability lies between the operations. Thereby through ideation, evaluation and further development towards the conducted requirement specification, a solution to start with is to make sure the visual management works. A solution creating a complete overview of the production between all operations integrating new products with aftermarket using a new kind of visual production control boards. These visual production control boards will help prioritizing using FIFO queues and daily meetings, seeing capacity demands and troubles easy by stacking station- or areawise and also create an altogether working flow together with the current layout of the production site.   Further recommendations include further development of these visual production control boards together with implementing a CONWIP planning and control principle using wagons, standardize communications and continuously become more transparent inside the company. The proposed solutions might not guarantee N days inside the Järfälla production site but it will help operators, planners and management to easier locate problems and allocate capacity to increase the flexibility of the production.