Last October Detroit Diesel, a division of Daimler, unveiled the DD15—a new heavy-duty diesel engine ready to set new efficiency standards for the industry. To manufacture the engine, Detroit Diesel invested $275 million to refurbish and retool its 3-million-square-foot manufacturing plant in Redford, Mich. That project included new materials handling and storage processes to support the lean manufacturing line.

“If you look back to 2003 when we began designing the new engine, we were a traditional manufacturing facility with no well-defined storage locations,” says Chris Russell, material flow engineering supervisor. “To produce the DD15, we had to create a central warehouse area, with narrow-aisle high bay storage to free up space for the new assembly line.”

The central warehouse area takes up just 30,000 square feet, considerably less than the 80,000 square feet of space that was previously used. Some of that space is for other manufacturers that lease space from Detroit Diesel. “At any given time, as much as a third of the plant is utilized by mall tenants who lease from us,” says Russell. “One of our goals is to not only free up more space for our products, but also to open up space for manufacturing tenants.”

Detroit Diesel also implemented a kanban system to pull material to the line on a just-in-time basis rather than store parts and components at the line.

One of the keys to making these new processes work was a series of specially designed carts (Topper Industrial, 262-886-6931, www.topperindustrial.com) that are used with tuggers and automatic guided vehicles (AGVs) to deliver parts and components to the line just in time, and in some cases, in sequence. In place of a traditional assembly line, the AGVs route the engines from one workstation to the next during the manufacturing process.

While Detroit Diesel is still ramping up production of the DD15, the manufacturer is already seeing productivity rise. “We have improved our on-time delivery of parts from the storage area to the line,” says Russell. “And we're seeing improvements in quality.”