Study On Method Of Plan Formulation For Radial Forging Product Line Based On Production Capacity Limitation

Production planning is one of the critical contents of iron and steel enterprises. The improvement of production planning will reduce the inventory of production line, improve equipment utilization, improve contract fulfillment rate. Thereby, it will reduce the costs, increase the efficiency, and then improve the operations benefits of the enterprises.This paper first reviewed the literature about the status of research and application of production planning. Based on the literature review, this paper analyzed the production line’s features and products’ characterization, the main equipment’s performances, production process of the radial forging production line of XCC plant, as well as the study of the planning system of the production line, then found the problems in the formulation and implementation of the plan of radial forging production line using some project management and statistical tools and methods, such as Gantt chart and regression.In response to these problems, some solutions were proposed on this paper. First, critical bottlenecks of the production line were found. Based on the process time, by means of data statistics and regression methods, the capacity of critical equipments of the production line and their relationships with the products specifications were found. The capacities and table of standard capacity coefficient of radial forging machine and ESR furnace were created. Secondly, based on the theory of constraints(TOC), some principles for the planning formulation of radial forging production line were developed. This will partly reduce the capacity pressures of the critical equipments and partly release the capacities of them. In this way, the production capacity of the whole production line will be improved largely.In addition, some improvement methods, such as reducing external uncertainty, defining daily plan in detail, standardizing plan issuing process, and strengthening scheduling system management, were proposed to solve other operations issues of the production line. This will ensure the smooth implementation of production plan.The study results of this paper are based on the analysis of XCC radial forging production line. To a certain extent, the results have universal significance to the same type of production lines. Some of the improvement plans have already been carried on in the radial forging production line and achieved good results.