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 Aerospace manufacturing is a high technology industry where quality and safety get the highest priority in design and production processes. Last year Incontrol carried out a simulation project at Techspace Aero, partner of the world’s major aerospace engine manufacturers. Techspace Aero designs, develops and produces modules, equipment and test cells for aircraft and space engines.
Their basic activity is the design and manufacturing of modules and components for aero engines, with a particularly strong expertise in low-pressure compressors and high tech parts.
Techspace Aero faces increasing demand volumes in the next years. Therefore they need to expand production capacity and install additional production utilities. A key condition for successful production management is the streamlining of existing production lines, as well as optimal integration of new production utilities.
The logistic performance has to be improved at several points:
- Substantially increase production volume
- Significant reduction of lead times
- Cost reduction by reduction of work in progress quantities
- Contribute to organizational and cultural change
At all times the production quality should be kept at the highest possible levels.
Objective
To meet the described challenges, a number of expansion scenarios were developed for the Fan & Drum manufacturing shop. The production of the fan and drum parts is spread over a range of production stages, including machine and manual operations and several inspections. The complexity of interactions between the production stages makes it difficult to predict which scenario will result in the best performance. The indicators to measure are: productivity (produced parts per week), leadtimes per product type, work in progress quantities and utilization rates for machines and operators. The objective for the simulation project was to compare a number of scenarios with different production volumes on these indicators in order to support the manufacturing managers in their decision to implement one of the scenarios.
Scope
The simulation model contains the fan disk and drum production line for the parts GEnx Fan, GP7000 Drum and GP7000 Fan. The production flow is implemented from the start of the line where spare parts are taken from the warehouse until the last inspection step before the parts are sent to the assembly line. Processes like special treatments and processes that are outsourced are implemented as a black box. As the production volume for these parts will vary in the coming years, the defined scenarios contain quantities for the years 2009-2011.
 Results
First results from experimentation showed a very high load on some machines. After a reallocation of production steps on these machines the results for production volumes improved significantly.
Further experimentation is done to compare different scenarios for push, pull and mixed push-pull strategies in the line. The mixed push-pull strategy showed a good performance in controlling the number of parts in the line (influencing work in progress and leadtimes) and in protecting the bottleneck machines. The objective for these machines was to keep them running all the time, as a missed part there will never come back. The mixed strategy enables Techspace Aero to protect the bottleneck and guarantee the required production targets. The simulation model can be used to define the required quantities in different parts of the line.
Together with the simulation model an interface in Excel has been developed. It enables the user to change input parameters in an easy way, run the simulation and analyze the results in Excel. In the coming years the production volumes per product type will vary from time to time. The model can be used to test the production line if it is possible to produce the different quantities. The influence of breakdowns and reworks can be tested as well as the allocation of production steps on different machines. |
