Assembly line & Sub-Assmbly Stock process optimizations at "WTE Präzisionstechnik GmbH"

Abstract: Decreasing takt times and frequently changing customer demands and customized products are the challenges of modern companies. To achieve these targets topics like increasing flexibility, decreasing the lead time and decreasing the lot size are just some of the measures companies work on to meet the customer demand. To be able to realize these topics, it is compulsory to have lean and working manufacturing processes. But the value stream is not ending in the manufacturing area. In the last step before the delivery, all the manufactured and bought components have to be assembled together. Due to the Toyota Production System and further methods, which came from Japan, the main focus of a lot of companies and research has been to make the production as lean as possible, generate a continuous flow of products and eliminate waste. Very often the optimi-zations, which were performed in the previous stages, caused a bottleneck transfer to the assembly department, which has not been focused on that much. But especially this sector is important to finally grant the demanded customer quality. Due to this fact, this master thesis will mainly focus on finding an appropriate assembly sys-tem; analyze the value streams during assembling, eliminate waste and decouple the sub-assembly stock from the assembly line to have a clear separation between assembly and logistics. The main target is to generate a lean assembly line, which can feed the high prod-uct variability and increasing customer demands for the future. Therefore topics like One-Piece-Flow, Kanban, decreasing Work in Progress (WIP) and Chaku-Chaku lines are just starting points to generate a future oriented assembly system.