Improving the flow of materials and information from a Lean perspective - A study performed as a part of a project at Faiveley Transport Nordic AB

Abstract: Faiveley Group is an international company present in 22 countries, and with their headquarters in France. The subsidiary Faiveley Transport Nordic AB, Faiveley, is responsible for the Nordic and Baltic markets and is also the competence centre for the development of the BFC brakes. Faiveley is currently in a changing period and various projects are currently in progress, including hiring outside Lean consultants working to streamline the company. The authors delimited the thesis to purchased articles, meaning k-articles, without any need of further processing. From this starting point the authors have worked with the research questions:
How can the material flow and material handling be improved to meet higher demands on visualizations, cost efficiency and availability?
How can the information flow and work routines in the supply chain be improved to meet higher demands on visualizations, cost efficiency and availability?
The authors’ way of conducting logistical research is based on the foundation that logistics handles real-life problems in a complex and constantly changing environment. The research is conducted as a cyclical process with both empirical and theoretical studies, giving it an abductive approach. Case studies are a strategy with similar characteristics and are intimately connected to system thinking. Data collection methods like interviews, observations, time studies and archive analysis provides researchers with both better in-depth understanding and also a possibility to triangulate the research. This makes the improvement suggestions more reliable and valid to Faiveley.
A central part of the research is the Lean philosophy and the importance to implement the whole concept of Lean and let it permeates the whole company. The authors also try to give more concrete suggestions on improvements, which together affect the whole “house of Lean”. A special focus have been on Kaizen, continuous improvements, Heijunka, minimize irregularities, Kanban, pull system, and in general reducing the eight types of waste. Other theories and tools used, primarily to identify the waste, are time studies and Sequence-based Activity and Method of Analysis, SAM.
During interviews and through observations it was noted that the automatic storage units, ASUs, were bottlenecks. An analysis of the internal transactions showed that 20 percent of the k-articles accounted for 80 percent of the work. Improving the material flows for these 20 percent, by storing them in racks instead of the ASUs, much waste is saved. The solution is a so called Fast-Pick-Area, in which a warehouse worker is assigned the responsibility to replenish and maintain the area. To facilitate the work an article classification model was developed and suggested. This simple model can also be used in future Kaizen work.
Other suggestions presented, to Faiveley, are that they should start a standardization program for k-articles, along with reductions of rearranging orders in the production, to reduce waste, is part of the thesis together with an analysis of the potential introduction of a dedicated warehouse for the service department. The thesis is concluded with a list of bullet points with improvements that the authors recommend.