Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance

Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

LEAN MANUFACTURING APPLICATION TO AN AUTOMOTIVE ASSEMBLY LINE

Duarte Trindade*, Pedro Leal*, Paulo Peas**, Elsa Henriques** *AgilTec-Engenharia e Tecnologia para a Produo Eco-Eficiente Estrada do Pao do Lumiar Campus do INETI, Edf. M6; 1649-038 Lisboa, Portugal dtrindade@agiltec.pt ; pleal@agiltec.pt, **Instituto Superior Tcnico, Seco de Tecnologia Mecnica Av. Rovisco Pais 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal ppecas@ist.utl.pt ; e.henriques@ist.utl.pt
Abstract

Portuguese automotive industry began at sixties of last century, mainly based on CKD (Components Knock Down) assembly plants. Since then a long process of technological, engineering and organizational development has taken place and, nowadays, automotive components industry can be considered a standard of manufacturing excellence in the national and even sometimes in the global context. Nevertheless, we can still find companies in the automotive sector based on the initial CKD concept needing logistics, organizational and agility improvements to sustain their competitiveness in particular market niches. In this paper a diagnosis of a small-scale assembly line of small trucks is presented, focusing on the organizational and work methods, internal logistics and lean manufacturing procedures. The full manufacturing system characterisation and the identification of waste generation and production bottlenecks, created the framework to develop a set of actions both on an organizational/structural basis and on internal logistics, whose implementation allow a huge advance on productivity. Keywords: assembly_line; lean_manufacturing, automotive_industry, manufacturing_excellence. although in the last decade a considerable growth of exportations had occurred [1]. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to contribute to the demystification of some concepts related with the improvement of manufacturing systems, like lean manufacturing and more recently the agile production that would appear to be the blueprints for future manufacturing [2]. In a broad concept the aim of lean manufacturing consists on keeping production steady and predictable and minimize cost and waste in a world of business that is increasingly volatile and unsteady [3]. Lean Manufacturing has captivated the imagination of manufacturing people in many countries and its implementation is now a commonplace for large companies [4]. Although, as regards to SME their lack of advanced competencies and their typical focus on day to day production problems have been an obstacle to lean manufacturing expanding. Normally the SME companies look at this sort of concepts as they have a mysterious theory behind or something completely exoteric and unintelligible [3]. However, if they look closer, they will perceive that when we are talking about lean manufacturing we are simply talking about
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INTRODUCTION
Since the beginning of the last century, the automobile has performed true small revolutions in quite a few levels, starting with the ones emerged from the common user expectations, until those strictly related to improvement of the technical and economical industrial environment. The huge automotive value chain justifies the natural trend of our industry in undertaking an active and relevant position in the sector at several levels and within a diversity of competences [1]. Throughout almost a century, several efforts have been developed to achieve a position of automotive constructors and/or at least to reach as relevant suppliers of the big constructors. The unsuccessful of these efforts is mainly due to the lack of a sustainable strategy that focuses the critical factors of competitiveness and their dynamic behaviour. Nowadays the national scenario of the automotive industry (with a national decision centre) can be resumed basically to the auto parts manufacturing. This capacity is mainly used to supply the OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) with assembly facilities in Portugal,

Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

manufacturing without waste. The waste, which is broadly considered as any type of consumption of resources without a correspondent added-value in the product or service, can take many configurations [2]. As examples we can refer material and time wastes, idle equipment and inventory. Several authors refer that most companies waste between 70% and 90% of their available resources and even the best lean manufacturers probably waste about 30% [3]. These figures constitute themselves a tremendous opportunity towards the progress of productivity and industrial competitiveness and embody a large field for the improvement of the materials handling, inventory reduction, quality assurance, scheduling and layout configuration, personnel empowerment and, of course the final goal, customer satisfaction. In short, lean manufacturing embraces the entire manufacturing system. Starting with the customer and including the product and process engineering, the production management, the final assembling and all tiers of the supply chain, lean manufacturing is essentially a systematic approach to identify the wastes, to evaluate improvement potentials, to propose and design best solutions and finally to implement these solutions in a controlled way[2][3]. We have no doubt that any truly lean system is highly dependent on the demands of its customers and on the reliability of its suppliers. The success of lean manufacturing relies on effective analysis and planning including the entire enterprise [4]. One thing is certain: there is no recipe book for lean manufacturing. While certain principles may be immutable, their application is not. Each company has its own unique set of products, processes, people, culture and history. We have to give heed to the company particularities in their involving and consider lean manufacturing implementation as an individual process.

area. The production starts at the CKD area, where all components and modules are unpackaged, checked and distributed in several conveyors and trays depending on their future use. Some of these materials are pre-assembled, before its introduction in the assembly line, namely the transmission shaft, the brake light supports and some components of the engine.

Fig. 1. Assembly line layout and materials flow As referred above, four workstations, a product certification area and the final quality control area compose the assembly line. In the first workstation the operations related with the heavy mechanics of the vehicle are performed, so here within are handle the components with large dimensions/weight. In the second workstation the operations related with the trimming of the chassis are made, namely in what regards the electrical system, the vacuum system and the braking system (all the cable- systems). The third workstation is basically characterized by the operations related to the coupling of the cabin and engine. In the fourth workstation the final operations are carried out, such as the final filling up as well as the final small assemblies at the interior and exteriors levels. Finally the vehicle is turned on to assess its functioning. In the product certification area the wheels calibration and a general inspection are performed. Finally, in the control area some tests and controls are made to evaluate the quality of the product in a systematic and rigorous way.

SYSTEM PRESENTATION
The work presented in this paper was performed in a company that among other activities, like metalworking and industrial parts painting, runs a production line in which medium and light-duty trucks are assembled. This assembly line has a layout strongly characterized by a product-oriented structure. So, like in most automotive facilities, all the necessary technologies and resources are strictly dedicated to the product assembly requirements. In Fig. 1 is presented the general layout of the manufacturing plant, with the CKD (Complete Knock Down), pre-assembly areas, the four assembling workstations (WP) and a final control
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SYSTEM ANALYSIS
To take the maximum advantage of the application of lean manufacturing principles the first step should be the identification of critical areas/problems. Afterwards, it is necessary to select a methodology and a technique to analyse and quantify them. Finally, new procedures should be designed and tested to evaluate their potential success. Considering the evaluation, through

Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

technological/economical indicators, the implementation phase, with a close control of methods engineering, will take place until its complete validation. The system diagnosis began with the direct observation of the operators and workflow. In fact, only through a simple visual analysis and through informal brainstorming emerged from a set of whys several simple solutions without implementation cost and with an evident benefit that were conceived and applied. An example of those promptly improvements was a new layout for the location of some manual tools, in order to reduce the waste of time in the movement of operators inside each workstation. However the benefits of these simple improved solutions are distant from the limit gains in productivity. A further analysis was required to achieve a complete diagnosis of the assembly line. Some of the critical points identified were related with the main pillars of a manufacturing system, namely, global layout and the assembly line balance. Consequently, it was necessary to quantify the real impact of these critical points to be able to justify any modification, which at this level always imply a strong impact on the manufacturing system. After the direct observation, the production line was evaluated using the methods-study and timestudy techniques. This analysis has as main objective the establishment and the normalization of procedures to allow a maximum effectiveness and quality in the assembly process. It will be accomplished through the improvement of some processes and procedures and through the suitability of the workstations resources (operators, equipment and tools) to the nature of the operations. For each workstation, a list of operations was prepared and to each operation its responsible and the resources required were identified. Moreover, a layout of each workstation was created to completely understand if the arrangement of the materials and tools was optimised and also if the operations division was done regarding its location in the product. The layout of the workstation 1 is presented in the Fig. 2 as an example. Due to the high number of operations in each workstation and the randomness of the operation sequence at each workstation, the analysis tool selected was a time sample method through instantaneous observations. Basically, this method consists in the observation of each workstation status (photos of each workstation) at random instants. Through that workstation status sampling it is possible to infer the behaviour of the assembly line.
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Fig. 2.

Workstation 1 Lay-out

Due to the high volume of data generated during this analysis a software application was developed to assist the analysis process. This tool has the capability to create random time sheets and generate several graphs with relevant data treated for each workstation or operator and for the overall assembly line. In the Fig.3 it is possible to observe the performance of the three operators involved in workstation 1. The graph presents for each operator the time distribution through five different operator status.
89,4% 81,7% 72,7%

WS 1
Operation Dislocation Absence Waiting Time Out-WorkStation

9,6% 0,5% 0,5%

13,1% 6,7% 7,1% 0,4%

15,4% 1% 1,9%

Operator 1

Operator 2

Operator 3

Fig. 3.

Operators Performance, workstation 1

In the operators graph (Fig. 3) it is possible to evaluate the labour performance, observing the percentage of effective work related to value added operations and compare it with others nonproductive features like the percentage of the operator time devoted to dislocations, absence and waiting (for work, for the availability of resources, etc), and also the percentage of time each operator is not at their workstation (but is at the shop-floor). With this kind of analyse it is possible to balance the work contents associated to the different operators in a workstation, as well as take some training approaches that allow a

Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

better posture and teamwork attitude in their quotidian work. Finally, the analysis supports, in a quantitative way, a relevant inefficiency related to the workstations layout. Indeed more than 10% of the operators time is spent in travelling in the interior of each workstation. The previous analysis allows the identification of the operators time distribution. But the analysis it is not sufficient when it is necessary to deal with line balancing improvement. In fact under the operator status operations several elementary operations are performed. So within each workstation a detail analysis of the work contents was performed. In the vertical axis of the graph presented in Fig. 5 each number represents one elementary operation (with value added in the product) executed in the workstation and each letter is a non-productive operation (without value added), which are common to all the workstations, namely waiting, absence etc. The major outputs of this graph are the time spent in each operation and the total time required to perform all the operations in a workstation. The time required for each operation was, when possible, decomposed in several tasks types: assembly, fixation, preparation and others.

Every workstation and every operator were analysed individually through the use of this type of data processing and presentation. Making a general picture of the overall assembly line in terms of the tasks decomposition made (Fig. 4), it is possible to conclude that about 50% of the available time is not used to add value on the product. Tasks classified as preparation or other tasks that, effectively, do not built trucks, even if in some cases they could be considered as necessary for the process. Based on the results obtained, the effective nonproductive operations represent almost one third of all the operations performed.
Others 28,4% Fixation 14,6%

Preparation 24,5% Assembly 32,5%

Fig. 4.

Time decomposition in task classes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 a b c d e f

4,2% - 4 min. 2,3% - 2,2 min. 7,9% - 7,5 min. 3,5% - 3,3 min. 8,7% - 8,3 min. 5,6% - 5,3 min. 4,9% - 4,7 min. 4,2% - 4 min. 0,3% - 0,2 min. 2,6% - 2,5 min. 2,5% - 2,3 min. 1,6% - 1,5 min. 3% - 2,8 min. 1,8% - 1,7 min. 5,9% - 5,6 min. 9,5% - 9 min. 3,3% - 3,1 min. 0,7% - 0,6 min. 0,5% - 0,5 min. 1% - 1 min. 3,1% - 3 min. 1,2% - 1,1 min. 3,1% - 3 min. 11,7% - 11,1 min. 2,9% - 2,7 min. 2,9% - 2,7 min. 1,3% - 1,2 min.

WS1

Others 29,2%

Fixation 19,4%

Assembly 26,8%

Preparation 24,6%

tm = 95

Fig. 5.

Operations time in Workstation 1 (medium time, tm = 95 min

With the information gathered it was possible to generate another analysis in terms of the overall time currently spent in the different workstations, in order to evaluate their
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equilibrium in terms of work content and operators distribution all along the assembly line. A graphic presentation of the results of this analysis is shown in Fig. 6.

Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

RECOMMENDATIONS
In this section the major achievements of the intervention, as regards to the suggested improvements and their potential benefits, will be presented. Observing the graph in the Fig. 6 several conclusions can be drawn. The workstation 1 represents the assembly line bottleneck and sets its cycle time in 95 min. The discrepancy between the timework of the different workstations is notorious. Considering that we are dealing almost only with manual operations this reflects the lack of equilibrium in the operation/operators division through the workstations. The yellow horizontal line in the graph represents the theoretical cycle time (80.6 min) obtained just by the distribution of the operations through the workstations, without perform any methods of improvement inside the workstations. This represents per se an improvement of 20%, just by changing the workstation where some operations are performed. Considering that the useful time of production is about 7h20min/day (440 min), due to the existing break periods in the working day (8h/day), and 4,6 vehicles is the daily capacity output of the assembly line. So, a 20% increase

in the cycle time is materialised in almost one more vehicle assembled per day. Through the graph presented in the Fig. 6 it is possible to confirm the initial intuition that the workstations where the operations involving larger parts are performed, specifically the workstation 1 and workstation 3, show a smaller variability of the average operations total time. Relatively to the workstation 2 we can see that the first measurement is totally in disharmony comparatively to the remaining ones, this can be explained by the fact that this measurement coincides with the first vehicle in the batch, denoting the need of operators habituation to the work content in this workstation. The application of the methods and time study allowed to build a repository of information and quantified data that permitted the establishment of some recommendations as regards to a new operations distribution through the workstations, in order to get a 20% increase in productivity. Obviously this new distribution was done regarding the active constrains like the technological precedence between operations, the available skills in each workstation and the costs of the modification.

102 95 93 96 89 79,2

104

Theoretical Cycle Time =80.6 min

tc equilibrado = 80,6

94 86 81,2 75 69 69 83 73 83 84 77,3

70,2 67

73

74 64

57

Posto 1 Workstation 1

Posto 2 Workstation 2

Posto 3 Workstation 3

Posto 4 Workstation 4

Posto - Pr-Montagem Pr Pre-Assembly

Fig. 6.

Overall assembly line analysis

Unfortunately, this short analysis is not common in the daily activity of the company. If they adopt current procedures related to the production monitoring, the company would be able to create a set of data to support the continuous improvement actions and to measure their impact on productivity. As the data is
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getting more and more consistent they would be able to track non-productivity time and therefore reduce costs. Considering the kind of workforce presented in the line, which is constituted by low qualification/high experience operators, the work

Paulo Peas, Elsa Henriques Lean Manufacturing Application to an Automotive Assembly Line Proceedings of the Business Excellence I - Performance Measures, Bechmarking and Best Practices in New Economy Braga: Escola de Engenharia da Universidade do Minho (ed. G. D. Putnik, A. Gunasekaran), p. 590-595, 2003

developed was done in a close interaction with the line operators. Indeed any line modification or recommendation was previously discussed with them. On the one hand, the experience of the operators has effectively a high practical value as regards the generation of new ideas and the first validation of the proposed ones. On the other hand, the operators involvement facilitates their adherence and acceptance to the process and enlarges their motivation towards a continuous improvement and teamwork attitude. It should be noted that before the line assembly diagnosis through the methods and time study that provided the quantitative measures, the line unbalancing was not obvious. In fact the initial visual observation has not shown particular waits and the line seems to be perfectly balance. One must remember that manual work tends to extend itself through out the available time. As referred above, the layout was also analysed and two alternatives were idealised. Relatively to this topic only some highlights will be given because it will be the target of a future publication The existing layout did not support the linearity and smoothness of the materials flow and people displacements. So the alternatives were created to eliminate or reduce the critical points of the existing one. Once more, all the shop-floor operators were involved particularly the ones responsible by the internal logistic. In this field, it was necessary to estimate the volume of the medium and maximum stocks of each item (largely related to the external supply constrains), calculate the dimension of the warehouses and the point of use storages. The first alternative layout was created regarding the minimal impact on current line functioning and a reduced transportation cost. It kept the main functional areas and displaced the CKD and Pre-assembly cells near to the assembly line. Using this simple principle it was possible to foresee a 20% reduction in time wasted in travels. The other layout idealised is a real cut off with the existing one. The total distance between the unloading area and the area where the final product is delivered is reduced. The total transportation distance is reduced by almost 50% and the result is a far more linear and agile layout. Fig. 7 shows the total distance covered by a batch assembly (six units) in the different alternatives.

Layout Distance

A 5977m

B 4929m

C 3250m

Fig. 7. Layout alternatives (A - existing layout; B small improvements / minimal impact on current layout; C - radical transformation layout/great impact)

CONCLUSIONS
The study carried out generated several new procedures and recommendations within the global objective of productivity increasing with incremental improvements in the manufacturing system. Some of these new procedures were implemented during the intervention and other remained as recommendations for future modifications in the manufacturing system. Although not all solutions were immediately implemented, the estimated increase of productivity was always significant. In particular, through the application of good practices of line balance a 20% increase in the number of vehicles produced per day was achieved. A new layout design foresees about 50% decrease in the time spent in materials flow. The main conclusion transmitted with this paper is the demystification of the application of several methods and techniques related with the lean manufacturing approach to the continuous improvement. Lean manufacturing is mainly an attitude or a mindset and not just a collection of techniques. Through the incorporation of a lean manufacturing attitude it is possible to have all the organization involved in the search of excellence within the existent resources framework.

REFERENCES
[1] Tavares, L.V., A Engenharia e a Tecnologia ao Servio do Desenvolvimento de Portugal, 2000, Ed. Verbo, Portugal. [2] Allen, J., Make Lean Manufacturing Work for You, Manufacturing Engineering, Jun, vol. 123 n7, 2000, SME. [3] Womach, J.P., Lean Thinking: where have you been and where are you going, Manufacturing Engineering, Sep, vol. 128 n9, 2002, SME. [4] Drucker, P., Strategies for the 21st Century, Tooling & Production, Apr, 2000, Manufacturing Center, Nelson Publishing, Inc.

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