The Research Of Plant Logistics Improvements Of Ebmpapst Company

Ebmpapst is a traditional manufacturer mainly focusing on design, production and sale of industrial fans. With more intense competition from the market in recent years, the profit of Ebmpast company breaks low record. It becomes company strategy to reduce operational cost and enhance competitiveness. The thesis studies how to achieve the company strategy through plant logistics improvements.AC40 production line is chosen as the subject of study in this thesis. There are two main issues in terms of plant logistics on this production line: 1) material delivery to production line was not well organized. All materials were prepared and picked through production order, which caused too much material stock on line and too high cost of material delivery. 2) Machines with similar functions were placed together to maximize output. The result of such arrangement is batch flow, too big space needed and long production lead time.Logistics improvement study between raw material warehouse and workshop is to classify all AC40 raw materials into 7 different types. The classification is based on pickup frequency and yearly consumption cost. Different logistics methods are applied for different material types. The methods include: pull with Kanban, trigger by safety stock and deliver by production orders. After improvements, the important materials are allocated with more management resources, while management cost of less important materials are reduced tremendously.The thesis studies the advantages of “vertical arrangement” of production equipments(equipments arranged based on process flow). After AC40 equipments were rearranged in vertical way, stocks between process steps were eliminated with one piece flow or one box flow achieved. Meanwhile, bottleneck of AC40 production line was defined and studied. Solution was worked out to increase the output of bottleneck station, thus balance the capacity of each steps, reducing the stocks between steps.In last part of this thesis, some indices were introduced to measure the effectiveness of the plant logistics improvements. Such indices include: WIP stock, production order lead time, distance of material flow and production space needed.