Improving Leanness and Productivity in Automotive Manufacturing
The Business Challenge
MAL produces pressed metal parts, machined components, and welded assemblies for the automotive industry. It has over 60 years of experience in the automotive sector. Its customers are high-volume first-tier suppliers to mainstream prestige original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Prior to this project MAL used traditional manufacturing approaches with relatively little digitalization or Industry 4.0 technology.
MAL has nine coil feed presses, several CNC tube manipulation, turning machines and robotic welding machines. MAL makes-to-print and has its own tool-making facility. It employs approximately 40 full-time staff, mostly on the shop-floor, and makes extensive use of casual labour.
At the start of this project digitalization was limited to an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for sales order processing and a Quality Management System (QMS) to record quality. Both were dependent on manual data input, extraction and analysis. Some machines had computer controlled interface but live data was not yet extracted.
Action Research and Systems Thinking
This digital transformation project focused on the digitalization of shop-floor operations and associated office activities. MAL defines eight core strategic KPIs and eight operational KPIs. By using PrOH Modelling as a method of enquiry researchers were able to ascertain ways to improve these KPIs by improving the production system and improving the technology that measures them. The project used socio-technical systems as a theoretical underpinning to help critique observable practice. The systemic success factors of change are summarised by the given strategic PrOH Model.
The Benefits
Actions arising from this research had significant impact on strategic and operational KPIs which were achieved by focussing on the systemic success factors of dynamic capabilities.
On one hand it was noticeable that some KPIs seemed to be adversely affected which was due to increased accuracy and visibility of data in comparison to the previous manual paper based approach. On the other hand some KPIs had immediately improved due to freeing-up direct labour and management time. Overall, in this two year project MAL had no additional direct labour but were able to achieve a 15% increase in productivity through digitalizing which enhanced lean practice.
The academic lessons learned from this research was how internet based technologies affected culture by making more information more available more quickly and enabling widespread systems interoperability for middle management. This enabled middle management and shop-floor workers to work together and speed up more accurate set-up, scheduling and design-for-manufacturability of parts. This project also produced a virtual factory environment for training operators on how to set up press machines more quickly and safely.
Further Details
This project was awarded the top category of ‘outstanding’ by its funding body Innovate UK.
