Just in time, just in sequence
Getting the right part to the assembly line at the right time and in the right quantity takes a synchronized effort up and down the automotive supply chain.
By Bob Trebilcock, Editor at Large -- Modern Materials Handling, 6/6/2007
When it comes to collaboration, few industries do it as well as the automotive industry.
How automotive does it
Plants synchronize the parts delivery to the line so an assembly worker doesn’t have to think about the part they’re about to install: The next part on the rack or in the tote is the right part for the vehicle in front of them.
It’s called just-in-time, just-in-sequence. In a JIT/JIS environment, the automaker electronically sends a production schedule for a time period to a sequencing center. The schedule includes a bill of materials for every car going down the line, in the order the vehicle is going to come down the line. The schedule is shared with parts suppliers who deliver their products to the sequencing center. They, in turn, pack the parts in containers—and in a trailer—in the right order to synchronize with the assembly line.
While it sounds easy, making it happen requires extensive collaboration between the automaker, a parts sequencing center generally located within a few miles of the plant, and parts and components suppliers up and down the supply chain.
“In true collaboration, the supplier understands the needs of the customer, right down to which vehicle is going to roll down the assembly line at what time,” says Marty Komer, a sales and marketing specialist with RT Systems, a provider of software solutions that enable JIT/JIS systems. “More importantly, the customer also understands the capabilities of the supplier and reverse engineers their needs into the supplier’s processes so they are seamless.”
Getting collaboration right
What Komer is getting at is that collaboration isn’t a technology. Rather, it’s a business process that uses technology to get the job done. But technology is only one of the tools.
For instance:
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One assembly plant Komer worked with began the collaborative design process by creating routes for the internal delivery of parts within their plants.
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Along those routes, they created footprints for staging parts before they went to the line. Those footprints were created based on standard lot sizes for parts.
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Those, in turn, were created based on the speed of the assembly line.
For example, if the line was geared to ship 64 cars an hour, all of the common lot strategies were divisible by that number. Parts were shipped in lots of 64, 32, 16 or some other number divisible by 64, depending on:
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the size of the part,
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the storage media (racks, totes, containers, etc.), and
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the amount of storage space at the line.
Next, the inside of the trailers used to ship parts between the sequencing center and the assembly plant were designed to accommodate the racks and totes.
“That let the sequencing center create sequencing processes around standard shipping containers, standard lot sizes and standard truckloads,” says Komer.
The result of that effort
“By collaborating, we were able to dramatically reduce errors and defects that slowed down the line because the sequencing center wasn’t guessing how many parts to put into a container,” says Komer.
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