Improving the Product Value Flow at Atlas Copco SED Yokohama, Japan

Sammanfattning: Atlas Copco SED, Yokohama develops and assembles surface drill rigs. Products are customized to suit customer need, which demands a make-to-order production with high flexibility. With changing customer demands, difficulties are experienced with estimating accurate future material and production capacity need. Periodical peaks and valleys in production occur with frequent changes to the production schedule and sometimes there is excessive inventory. There is a wish from management to decrease lead times and improve the system as a whole to better handle the difficulties. In this project, the company’s internal product value stream was investigated by following a product all the way from customer order to delivery and investigating supporting functions. The purpose was to develop improvement suggestions which if implemented could lead to shorter production lead time, increased efficiency (direct work time in relation to total required time) and potential inventory reduction. If this could be achieved, the circumstances to handle frequent changes would improve, as well as the company’s future competitiveness. The lean method of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) was used, since this provides an overview of the entire factory, rather than having process-specific focus, and offers a systematic way of finding the sources of problems and solving them. The results showed that problems are largely due to external factors; especially concerning customer demand forecast accuracy, and oversea suppliers sometimes having long lead times for material. However, production processes being cycled faster than takt and specialization in skills were two more factors, and others were found as well. Suggestions were made in the form of two future states, A and B, where one focuses on a more short-term perspective, and one on a slightly more long-term which requires more training and redistribution of assembly tasks. Both suggestions have potential to help work against the problems discovered. Suggestion A allows production to be run with a single scheduled pacemaker process and FIFO (First-In-First-Out) systems, while suggestion B involves the development of a continuous flow in the main line working according to takt. Future state A could decrease lead time up to 42% and reach an efficiency of 45%. Future state B could decrease lead time by 45%. In addition, future state B requires 3 less assemblers who can be assigned as team leaders and work for other support functions needed, and can reach an efficiency of 70%. Strategic suggestions were made for supply management and handling the forecast, which if implemented have the potential to decrease the risks of getting excessive inventory.