Research And Application Of WIP Management In Flow Manufacturing

WIP inventory management problems happened in many flow manufacturing enterprise. WIP inventory reasonable or not directly affect the enterprise flexibility, manufacturing cycle and so on. Especially in the labor cost of technology intensive tyre mixed production manufacturing industry, the manufacturing enterprises generally use the funnel model in the design production line, by existence of bottleneck in Curing phase. Reasonable WIP inventory in this situation directly affects the balance of production line and the final output. Therefore, for the mixed production of bottleneck WIP inventory was used to optimize and control effectively has become a topic of concern to enterprises.In this paper, study a lot on existing research of WIP inventory management theory and method, emphasizes the tire manufacturing industry in mixed flow production bottleneck WIP inventory management-Theory of Constraints. Starting from the theory of constraints, list and combine all the characteristics of mixed production mode, through the data acquisition and the weight of all factors in the real production data. Take both of upstream and downstream effects on WIP of M tyre comparison. Based on the upstream processes different, defined two type of production : the single machine single size production what called Mono-dim, and single machine double size production what called Bi-dim. Set the inventory factors by collection, analysis and balance for the two type production. Then put two kinds of production mode WIP inventory setting results as the theoretical data,and input to electronic Kanban management system to be applied and verified. Verification results show that the WIP setting brings to the enterprise economic and management benefits, not only reduced the loss of productivity because of WIP shortages, improve production line balancing level and ultimate capacity, and also get improvement in visual management and manpower cost saving.