AEROSPACE INDUSTRY

Aerospace Industry

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction3

Background of the study3

Purpose of the study5

Rationale of the study5

Significance of the study7

References10

Chapter 1: Introduction

Background of the study

Manufacturing companies throughout the world in many industries are adopting lean manufacturing methods, a fundamental shift from traditional mass production. The original model for lean manufacturing is the King & Fowler Ltd Production System. King & Fowler Ltd runs their system with remarkably little information technology and relies heavily on simple, visual, manual signals to manage scheduling and material flow. As other companies in the modern computer age have been adopting lean methods the question arises: In what ways can appropriately applied information technology significantly enhance the performance of lean systems? (Cheng, 2002)

Central tenets of lean manufacturing include:

Takt time and Continuous Flow-All operations should ideally build at the pace of customer demand. Continuous flow is the ideal, building one piece at a time, which tends to minimize waste, with all operations building to takt time. Pull systems should be used when continuous flow is not feasible. In this case a small buffer (supermarket) is set up between operations and the feeder operation replenishes what is taken away by the downstream operation. Again, only the final operation (beginning of final continuous flow) is scheduled and then all upstream processes build to replenish what has been consumed by their immediate customer.

Production leveling--While ideally the lean system would build only what the customer needs exactly as they need it, in reality customer demand is not level. In a multiproduct environment, an uneven demand (e.g., a sudden surge in demand for one of the products) makes it difficult to service that demand unless there is a large inventory of all end products. This surge in demand is particularly disruptive for upstream suppliers (i.e., the bull whip effect). Lean manufacturing deals with this through heijunka, i.e., leveling demand by creating an inventory buffer and replenishing that buffer using a leveled schedule. (Ding, 1991)

Taiicho Ohno found that simplicity in manufacturing was a virtue. A part of that simplicity was to use visual systems whereever possible. Thus, the signals used to trigger more production were cards or kanban. They could be color coded, they traveled with the material so it was apparent if a kanban was missing, and operators and material handlers had to do something deliberate and manual to order parts. Kanban gave operators control over the scheduling process. By sending back a kanban they were literally sending an order to schedule capacity for the parts represented on the kanban. As vehicles became more complex ultimately thousands of parts all have cards attached to them. It is now common to have hundreds of components coming just to the final assembly operation. Yet, King & Fowler Ltd is able to handle that complexity adding only an automatic card sorter to sort out cards coming back from suppliers. The cards now have bar codes on them so that when they are read in that automatically updates a database that a transaction has occurred and ...