Accomodating production to the market demands of this era

Abstract: In the last decades the old manufacturing ideology which is based on only quantity has faded away. With globalization of the world, competitors in all industries have risen and instead of buyers searching for suppliers, now the manufacturers have to get to customers by distinguishing themselves from the other competitors. The main problems that the manufacturing companies face changed from how they can produce more to how they can get their product to customers more quickly in a changing market while improving the efficiency of their production. Hence most of the manufacturers tend to use lean manufacturing techniques to get a more flexible and agile production systems.The Distribution Transformer Factory of Asea Brown Boveri Turkey is facing with similar problems in adapting the customer-oriented production. The company is using a design-to-order system to meet each customer’s specific needs but the compatibility with its production system is discussable. Although the yearly capacity demands can be easily met, the system doesn’t show the flexibility to quickly accommodate its production to deviating customer order.The objective of this project is to create a new agile manufacturing system that can effectively meet the changing demands. In the first phase, from the data gathered from the production floor, a current state value stream map is created to get a clear view of the present situation. Through improvement on the marked processes a new production model, with less throughput time and increased reactivenes to changing demands, is created in future state value stream map. In the second chapter, the bottleneck that stands as the capacity and flexibility constraint of the system is unraveled according to the model created. A new changeover system is implemented and a formulation to generate process times to help the scheduling activities is created. Lastly a new inventory layout system is introduced which will support the new improvements in system constraint as well as all the other process.