HYBRID LEARNING FACTORIES: : A CASE STUDY
Sammanfattning: Due to the increase in customer demand standards in terms of quality, prices and delivery, the concept of being LEAN emerged almost 70 years ago. LEAN manufacturing is an essential model these days due to the increased need every day for sustainability and waste elimination. LEAN has become more than a group of techniques that are applied for the sake of improving the business profitability. It became a philosophy and a belief that can improve the lives of people and the usage of the resources on this planet. This need for change and adapting the LEAN philosophy highlighted the need for a highly trained base of young engineers. Atlas Copco as a leading company in many industries have started a LEAN academy which includes training the employees or customers on the LEAN techniques and giving them the real sense of experimentation in order to notice the results and improvements that come along. KTH Royal institute of Technology, as one of the leading engineering institutes worldwide, has cooperated with Atlas Copco in order to give access to the students to attend their LEAN learning factory located in Stockholm, Sweden. The limitation of availability of similar LEAN training facilities for other students and engineers around the world was questioned along with the possibility of introducing a tool that can increase the flexibility and efficiency of this training in order to act as a supplement to the physical learning factory and allow examination of the effects of applying more combinations of LEAN techniques and analyse the results on longer time horizons. The main objectives of this project included building a digital learning factory that represents Atlas Copco’s physical learning factory while allowing more flexibility in the LEAN scenarios that can be applied and tested as well as being able to examine the results on the long term. The second objective was to make this digital learning factory, which runs a real time discrete event simulation, to be realistic as much as possible by generating stochastic process times that resemble reality and show the increased time variability with manual assembly processes. GoLEAN, was the name chosen for the digital learning factory. The result of the project came to a success as the digital factory was built and verified and its results were also validated. It also satisfied the criteria that were set in the objectives as it allows more flexibility in choosing the simulation scenarios and the time horizon. It also provides more realistic results since it generates the process times through the probability distribution parameters that was analysed for each process through a video time study that was carried out for the physical learning factory. By setting 187 processes to 39 different probability distributions, the process time variability is obvious and resembles the data obtained from the real manual assembly. The digital factory shows real time 2D visualization of the factory while the simulation is running. GoLEAN provides results about several performance measurements that are considered essential for evaluation. This project showed a guideline for performing the same design methodology on other factories in order to examine various scenarios, production conditions and obtain long term results. Further improvements of GoLEAN may be increasing the performance measures obtained in the results and also improving the graphical visualization. GoLEAN is considered a teaching tool for LEAN manufacturing that can be used separately or as a supplement for the physical learning factory.
HÄR KAN DU HÄMTA UPPSATSEN I FULLTEXT. (följ länken till nästa sida)