implementing industry 4.0 technologies in lean production ... · 2005). network-based electronic...

XXIV Summer School “Francesco Turco” – Industrial Systems Engineering

Implementing industry 4.0 technologies in lean production through e-kanban automotive production

Menanno M.*, Ragno P.*, Savino M.M.*, Muhammad S.**

* Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Sannio, Piazza Roma 21, 82100 - Benevento – Italy ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected])

**Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Engineering and Technology, 47050 - Taxila – Pakistan ([email protected])

Abstract: In Lean Production environments, the need to supply the right quantity of material at the right times is the most important issue within a shop floor. Usually a kanban is made by two cards exchanged between the line and the warehouse with respect to the actual demand. When the number of lines served by a kanban system increases, the amount of kanban cards travelling in the shop floor may cause the loss of kanban cards, human errors in kanban emission and incorrect quantities supplied to the lines. This paper fronts these problems using the enabling technologies of Industry 4.0 to overcome the limits of traditional kanban cards. Within the case study, an electronic Kanban system (e-Kanban) has been implemented using wireless technologies to communicate the supplying information between the lines and a central supermarket. Within the research framework the deployment of the e-Kanban system is described in details. A benchmarking with the previous lean organization is conducted to appreciate the improvements obtained.

Keywords: Lean production, e-kanban system, industry 4.0, automotive industry, work in process (WIP). 1. Introduction The use of conventional Kanban has been designed to improve the visibility of workflows within production lines (Wan and Chen, 2008). Yet, a typical limitation of traditional kanban is related to the high number of cards used either when the number of different products increases, or when the number of lines served by kanbans cards increases. A typical problem raising within the Kanban technique is the loss of a card, that causes the delay or the interruption of material supplying. In this study a potential solution to these limitations is explored with a network-based electronic Kanban system (e-kanban) in a shop floor featured by multiple assembly lines. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a review of the recent literature state of the art, while section 3 describes all the steps to be followed for the proper functioning of the e-kanban. Section 4 introduces the analyzed case study and Section 5 presents the

WIP analysis. Section 6 reports conclusions and future works. 2. Lean Production and e-Kanban

A kanban system is intended as a system to control and improve the flow and inventory of materials in production process. The Kanban principle generates visual indicators to allow operators to decide the amount of components needed for production (Malhotra et. al., 2009; Suwanruji and Enns, 2002). Recent work confirms how a Kanban system is a method to answer to dynamic market changes, increase of quality, waste reducing (Taibi et al., 2017; Nurdiani et al., 2016). In recent years, many authors have shown how this technique is spreading and is widely used (Bhadury et. al., 2018, Dennehy and Conboy, 2016; Power and Conboy, 2015). Under this perspective Rahman et al. (2013) proposed in their work a case study with the implementation of a lean system to

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appreciate how this technique may work in multinational organizations. On this research line, Al-Tahat et. al. (2006) proposed a control scheme of Kanban-based environmental design production. The work of Turner et al. (2012) shows the efficacy of the kanban approaches in systems engineering within fast-response environments. They propose a general case to solve this problem by combining a systems engineering services approach with a kanban-based planning system. Hou and Hu (2011) proposed a system based on an integrated multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA) to determine the number and size of the pareto-optimal kanban. Within production environment, the typical advantages of using a Kanban system may include: (i) the reduction of work in progress (WIP), (ii) the monitoring and control of the production process, (iii) visual programming, (iv) the improvement of the flow (v) reactivity to changes, (vi) improvement and optimization of production capacity, (vii) and reduction of production times (Kumar and Panneerselvam, 2007). In the last few years the increased uncertainty of demand, augmented products’ variety, distributed manufacturing systems, and large shop floor system composed of multiple production lines raised some criticalities in a traditional card-based Kanban system (Cutler, 2005). Network-based electronic Kanban (e-Kanban) systems may inherit the benefits of using physical Kanban cards by overriding several limitations, such as the scope and distance of applied areas, amount and types of information contents, real-time tracking and monitoring and flexibility as well Kirovska and Koceski (2015) have evaluated the advantages of an e-kanban application, such as the reduction of work completion time, better flexibility, cooperation and collaboration. The first network-based Kanban system has been developed to bring the “pull” concept into a geographic-distributed manufacturing environment to plan and manage production flows more effectively (Wan and Chen, 2008). Kouri et al. (2007) attempted to define the factors influencing the success of electronic Kanban design from the point of view of pull production philosophy. In this context, Naik et al. (2012) presented an e-Kanban system to minimize operational and logistics issues for parts supplying. Under production management point of view,

Weber and Leisten (2017) and Qing et al. (2011) propose a new strategy for solving some small-batch production problems in Just-In-Time (JIT) environment. On the same line, Svirčević et al. (2013) described an electronic kanban system developed with VBA for assembly lines. Nakazaka and Tanaka (2016) developed a novel web-based digital Kanban tool with functions to visualize and limit the work in process. Using web databases and interactive web-based programs, a web server can provide operational functions for e-Kanban systems, including real-time tracking, performance measurement, interactive input/output, dynamic display, etc (Satoglu et. al, 2018). With network connections, the visibility of Kanbans and material flows is embedded either within one facility or over a long distance. Currently, e-Kanban systems are usually developed based on three different platforms: existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, electronic data interchange (EDI) connections, or web-based technology (Drickhamer, 2005). Due to the distinct routes that ERP and JIT systems took, conventional ERP systems offered limited support for pull-type material flow. Wan and Chen, (2008) developed a system using a Kanban Web programming platform where PHP and MySQL are used. An alternative is presented by Mayilsamy and Kumar (2011). These authors have introduced an electronic kanban system using bar-code scanning. Boucherie el al. (2009) described an electronic kanban system using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), while Jiang et al. (2010) proposed a RFID-driven conceptual method to track and visualize material flows by using e-Kanbans. Naik et al. (2013) present the use and the implementation of an e-kanban system to minimize operational and logistics issues for a parts supplier within the automotive industry. Based on these previous findings, we may argue that an e-kanban infrastructure may consist of i) a service engine, ii) database, and iii) user interface. The service engine contains the core modules to manage the e-Kanban transactions, job monitoring, performance measurement, etc. A web database stores and provides various data, such as quantity, timeframe, instruction, rules and procedures. Production plans are imported from the ERP system.

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This work adopts ICT infrastructure to replace traditional kanban system with an e-Kanban system software developed using Django programming language. The network infrastructure provides the connection of stations via wireless 809bg network system. Each station is provided with a graphical user interface. The workstation's graphical interfaces are also connected to the company's main database through the same network. Then, the advantages offered by the new system are analysed and presented. 3. e-Kanban working principle

The proposed e-kanban system aims to improve production work in process and throughput times. For the supply of the material to the lines a train milk-run system is used. The entire system works according to the following steps:

- The operator of each line opens the browser and enters the path for a specific operation (such as the request for the material).

- The browser sends a request to the server. - The line operator forwards the request to

receive a certain amount of components to the server.

- The server records the information and sends the request to the logistic operator.

- The logistics operator receives the request on a portable device. At this point he loads the train with the requested quantity of materials and sends the confirmation to the server.

- The server records the information and sends the request to the line operator, then the requested material is delivered with the upcoming train.

The e-kanban architecture consists of a database created using MySQL that connects to the ProLiant DL360 G7 server. The server is connected to the workstations of the lines via a wireless network using an 802.11b protocol (Figure 1). The interface has been developed with Django open source software and Python language.

Figure 1: Communication levels

4. Shop floor description The case study has been conducted on a shop floor composed of eleven multi-product assembly lines (Figure 2). Each line assemblies oil and/or vacuum pumps for automotive engines.

Figure 2: Shop Floor Layout

Currently this shop floor is organized with a double kanban card withdrawal/production, in which the components are collected from a supermarket supplying the lines. This Kanban card contains all the information required for the production and assembly of a product at each stage of its completion path. When the line operator needs materials, he puts the withdrawal card in the dedicated box. Then the logistics operator has to make a full path to collect all the withdrawal kanbans from that line. Concluded the path, the operator has to make another round of the shop floor to supply the lines based on the amount shown on the card. Considering that there are 11 lines in the shop floor, the number of cards and the logistic flows may grow exponentially, increasing

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the probability of accidental Kanban loss, errors, and logistic workforce saturation. Using the e-Kanban, the materials’ requests are shown in real time on the device of the logistic operator. The e-Kanban operation software provides interfaces for operators at the workstations to receive, process and fulfill the Kanbans. Operators log on to the system to view the designated Kanbans to that particular workstation. Based on the predefined user groups and authority level, only the authorized users can see the designated Kanbans and information through the user interface. The main window for each operator is a job list, including new jobs, in process jobs, pending jobs, and completed jobs. With certain criteria, the task of highest priority is prompted in the user interface so that the operator can follow and execute jobs with the required time-based order based on the colours visualized, where green, yellow and red represent in ascending order the components urgency level, as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3: Database interface of the logistics operator.

When a kanban order is selected, details of the job are brought up, including material requirement, work instructions. After the supplying of the material, the state of the order is changed on interface. Each of these action is featured by a time stamp in the server for tracking and performance analysis. 5. Results Analysis

The implementation of the e-Kanban system allows to overcome the Kanban limits and to reduce the amount of materials present on the lines (which have a cost). Compared to the Kanban tag method, there is a considerable saving of time in supplying the lines since the logistics operator does not have

to carry out a complete route to collect the red colour tags (i.e. the materials that are about to end), since the request for materials is displayed in real time on your device. To evaluate the reduction of the quantity of material present on the line or the quantity of material on board waiting to be processed Work in Progress (WIP), it is necessary to determine the number of boxes to be carried on the lines considering production and consumption. The WIP is evaluated with Savino and Mazza (2015) approach, where each component i is expressed as equation:

WIPi = 1𝛥 [𝑦𝑖𝑀𝐴𝑋+(𝑦𝑖𝑀𝐴𝑋−𝐶𝑖)]∗∆

2 = 2∗𝑦𝑖𝑀𝐴𝑋−𝐶𝑖

2

where: x 𝑦𝑖𝑀𝐴𝑋 is the quantity supplied for

component i; x Ci is the level of component i during time

Δ.

Considering the WIP for each component of the line 4 before and after implementation, the following situation is obtained:

Figure 4: WIP analysis Line 4

The same result is found for all the production lines in the shop floor lines, where a considerable reduction in WIP has been achieved, as shown in the following figure 5, in which the WIP is calculated first with the Kanban Card system and then with the introduction of the e-Kanban.

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Figure 5: WIP levels before and after implementation

6. Conclusions

The added value of the current e-kanban system lies in the possibility of knowing the actual inventory of the factory at all stations at any time, as well as the reduction associated with the WIP. Furthermore, the system minimizes the errors and inaccuracies present in the current system that uses paper forms. As the number of production lines increase, the number of card movement increases as well. The cards are lost or misplaced sometimes, which nearly always causes immediate problems in tightly interlinked JIT manufacturing. Using an e-kanban solution, the results identified the following advantages: (1) Real-time Kanban tracking: improved capability on tracking and monitoring can be achieved by Web-based services. The time stamps of all movements of a Kanban can be recorded in real time for performance analysis. (2) More reliable transactions: the automated data transaction minimizes the chance of human errors. Furthermore with the Web-based system, users log in to the server to retrieve Kanbans and execute them, and the status of each Kanban is updated and recorded in the server. If the Internet service fails, users would know immediately since they cannot proceed with the Web page. Upon recovering the connection, users will be guided to pick up the last task that is pending in the server. (3) Wide range of application: the Web-based system can be applied to different settings, including a pull production system, project-oriented production, project management, documentation system, etc. It can be applied internally with intranet connections, externally with Internet connections or both. (4) Performance monitoring: the e-Kanban system can

evaluate the performance of the system in real time. Since all Kanbans are dispatched and monitored by the Web server, the performance data are generated and stored automatically. Hence, we can argue that the use of web-based technology makes the Kanban system more effective by improving the existing pull strategy, considering the traditional card-based Kanban. The results show that WIP has been reduced for all lines and in particular for lines 2, 4, 6 and 7 there is a considerable reduction between 30% and 40%, which translates to an equal reduction in costs.

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