Leanorienterad flödesutveckling : av kärntillverkningen på Affärsenhet Cylinder ASSA AB

Sammanfattning: Business unit Cylinder at ASSA AB in Eskilstuna are having problem with frictions in their production process. Changes are occurring and older products along with machineries are phased out and transferred to low-cost countries. This opens up possibilities to at a larger extend customize physical flows after production flows. The authors where given the task to analyze the production and find problem areas to improve and to give suggestion on how Business unit Cylinder can work to optimize their production flow. The aim of the thesis work is to come up with suggestions on how to reduce the lead time in production and how the tied up capital can be reduced. In more detail the task included to find problem areas that are counteracting an effective flow, give solutions on new flows for the production of the cylinder core, give suggestions for new stock points for the production and how the production shall be managed and controlled. During the last twelve months ASSA AB has sold over 700 different types of cylinder cores, and the product range is very wide. Today ASSA AB has chosen to work with a layout design where similar machines stand close to each other in groups, so called workshop design. The first manufacturing step take part in a multi operations lathe where a brass pole is lathed and cut off to right size and shape and necessary wholes are drilled. Later on the cylinder cores receive their key profile. Finally some cores are drill protected with hard metal pins to increase the safety of the cylinder. The flow time is long in production and the total flow time for a cylinder core can be up to 160 days. There are a numerous amount of article numbers in stock with a huge combined stock value. Still, there are often wrong articles in stock and there are occurring shortage situations regularly. Set-up times are variably and differ significant between which products that the set-ups are performed between. The largest part of the long flow times is non-value adding time, and above all stock times which occurs because of the large batch sizes that are used today. This counteracts a fast and effective flow. The main reason for the large batch sizes is a long, variably and in many cases unknown set-up time. Out of performed calculations are given that about 880 000 SEK could be released from stock point L72 and L70 just by reducing the batch sizes to between 250-500 cylinder cores for high volume articles. This would reduce the stock value with over 75 percent for these article numbers. By shorten today’s long set-up times, and be able run smaller batch sizes, flow time should be able to be shorten from todays 100 days down to about 6 days.