PRODUCTION PLANNING AND “DEFINE, MEASURE AND ANALYSIS“ TOOLS IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY AS PREREQUISITE OF AUTOMATION: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

For the production planning process to be successful, an enterprise's internal business processes must be effective and efficient, while the DMAIC cycle is important aspect of practice-based continuous improvement. In accordance to those facts, this preliminary research includes the first part of the DMAIC methodology - “define“ and “measure“ tools, applied to a case study in automotive industry, with the aim of improving production planning processes. Analysis in “define“ phase starts with SIPOC, continues with calculation of critical indicators in “measure“ phase and is followed by Pareto charts. Research shows that the existing method of manual collection of production data is not precise enough, and during two months observation period, between 14 and 52 percent of planned production time on 9 observed machines, passed as unnoticed downtime. Further data analysis showed that this time is 1.5 to 9 times higher than the total reported downtime on individual machines. Results show that the further development of data collection tools is crucial, and the recommendation is to move in the direction of automation of that process in order to make the most of available technical resources, in “improve“ phase and to “control“ it by statistical comparison of previous and new state indicators