manufacturing processes modelling
Paragon has been involved in modelling manufacturing processes since its inception and has worked with many well known manufacturing companies, such as Xerox, Wedgwood, Thyssen and Outukumpu, to provide models to help them plan new facilities or improve existing ones.
Most manufacturing operations face some or all of the following challenges:
- Planning a plant for sufficient capacity or optimising an existing one
- Ensuring that a new facility is "right first time"
- Minimising equipment bottlenecks
- Organising equipment and facilities shared between competing processes
- Efficient use of staff - multi-skilling and re-assignment
- Discovering the critical processes that require optimisation
- Balancing optimum efficiency with the capacity to respond to demand variations
- Understanding the impact of equipment failures and explore mitigation options
- Assessing the relationship between costs and output levels
However, optimising complex multi-stage production processes, whether at the planning stage or already operational, is fraught with potential difficulties – the amount of data and the complex interaction of processes means that it is often impossible to be sure that the proposed solution is optimum.
Dynamic modelling, instead of simply using overall percentage efficiency and capacity figures - which are not representative of discrete events and stoppages and their knock-on impact in real production processes - mimics what actually happens in a production facility. One Paragon customer was astonished to find that their initial plans would achieve a throughput of only a fraction of that planned despite huge proposed investment in equipment. However, by examining the model results and understanding the key factors, our customer was able to re-plan – with no additional expenditure - to achieve the required capacity and the costs of major remediation work that would have resulted with the original plans were avoided.
Major investment in an assembly area for a new breed of printer - needed an animated model of the assembly circuit for Xerox to operate.
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A need to plan for maximum throughput in times of high demand (and prices) and greatest resilience to downturns and price erosion
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A generic simulation of stainless steel process enabled them to reduce inventory, increase efficiency, and produce schedules that minimised waste.
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"The model yielded substantial improvements in process and operational planning, savings on inventory (which was reduced by £6m) and improved lead times and gave Outokumpu confidence in the effect of new equipment investments and therefore the return on those investments."
