Capacity Planning Of Vendor Tooling In Automotive Industry

In automotive manufacturing industry tooling is widely used, and its management, design and manufacture are also very important. Among those tooling, many of them are placed in supplier side, thus those vendor tooling are called"vendor tooling". Management performance of those tooling directly impact the quality, delivery stability of production and service parts, management of assets. There is a wide coverage of vendor tooling placed in supplier, say, capacity planning, purchasing management, cost control, quality control, products management, capacity control, etc.. Currently, domestic automotive manufacturers attach little importance to the comprehensive capacity planning of vendor tooling, resulting in the problem of over-investment of tooling, capacity redundancy, or capacity imbalance of various kinds of parts. This paper aims at clarifying the management of capacity planning of vendor tooling, and introduce an effective management method of tooling capacity planning. Proper and unified capacity planning contributes to avoid from the problem of over-investment, capacity choke point, capacity imbalance, etc.The paper is based on the theory of Long-term planning and Material Request Planning (MRP), introducing the concept of lean capacity rate and establishing the theory model of capacity planning of vendor tooling. The main idea is:First of all, the paper makes a deep analysis of the automotive vendor tooling industry, and the feature of tooling. The vendor tooling has the feature of variety, distinction, large quantity, long using period, capacity and collecting in supplier side. Automotive parts have a variety of parts, covering many industries, say, metallurgy, mechanical manufacturing, chemical, electronic and electrical industry. And it the same case in the vendor tooling used in manufacturing parts. For automobile, almost all the vendor tooling is distinctive, and cannot been used commonly, thus, automotive manufacturers usually emphasis on the ownership of vendor tooling. Generally, the manufacturing life cycle of a new car model lasts 5 to 7 years, and the average using time of a car lasts 15 years (national mandatory scrap time period). Before reaching national mandatory scrap time period, automotive manufacturers should continuously supply service parts, which means the vendor tooling of a set of automobile lasts about 20 years. Because of the distinctive feature of vendor tooling, parts manufacturers do not amortize like the facilities and equipments to all related products, but amortize only to those products using the related tooling. Whatever terms of payment are used, ultimately automotive manufacturers shoulder all the expenses of tooling. Automotive manufacturers do not and can not directly manufacture all the automotive parts, only manufacturing 30% total value of automotive parts and other 70% supplied by parts suppliers. These variety kinds of parts with various kinds of vendor tooling exerts large amounts of quantity and investment. For the vendor tooling, 90% are placed in supplier, purchased by suppliers and authorized to use.Then, the paper is based on the theory of MRP to probe into how to plan capacity of vendor tooling placed in supplier. Automobile corporations usually make long-term plan, say, what kind of car model, how many level of the car, how many years to produce, and how many cars to manufacture, etc. MRP system can accurately calculate the time and quantity of material, clarify the structure and material of products. Products structure should list all the components, parts, assembly method and required quantity. Based on the above information, demand quantity of each part in the future time point or time period can be obtained. Planning volume of some certain vendor tooling is known with demand of each working day dividing daily capacity of each tooling. However, it only implements a relatively simple calculation method. In actual practice, there are many other influences, say sharing production line of the same parts of the same car model, or of different parts of different car models, color parts, different level of car model that have a great impact on the actual result.Besides, the paper points out that it will strengthen"the bullwhip effect"when planning the capacity of vendor tooling and the paper analyzes the difference between capacity planning and control. With the theoretic analysis above, the paper introduces the lean capacity rate, establishing theoretic model of capacity planning of vendor tooling with confirmation of lean capacity rate of each car model, and of each parts, planning quantity of vendor tooling placed in supplier.