The Research Of Bosch Group For Lean Line Design

With the increasing of domestic economy and government policy supporting mechanism, the automotive industry, including vehicle manufacturing and automotive parts manufacturing industry, has made considerable development, with certain problems. One of the major problems of domestic automotive industry is that the number of vehicle manufacturer is huge and competition is fierce. Meanwhile, domestic automotive industry concentration is not enough, resulting the consequence that industry standardization poor and huge market volatility. That brings significant challenges to the automotive parts manufacturer. Different from mature markets such as Japan, Europe and the United States, the domestic auto industry chain is not yet fully mature, so also do not have a good cooperation and win-win situation between the major manufacturers and suppliers of upstream and downstream, making the whole situation even more diverse. As a leader of the auto parts industry, in the face of the variable market environment, Bosch has many years of domestic operation experience and has made some mature experience of lean production.In this paper, we firstly addressed the problem in details based on the real case study of Bosch Suzhou with the production of wheel speed sensor, which the problem is the contradiction between the dynamic market requirement and in-flexible production system.Then we proposed the lean production system introduction as the countermeasure for the problem addressed above. In details, by introduce the case study of wheel speed sensor localized lean production line design, the paper described the Planning Guideline in lean system and associated lean line design principle and methodology.Planning Guideline is the extension of traditional lean principle by involves line principle into the Product Development Engineering as early as possible to make sure the lean requirements can be fusion and realized into product design. The Lean Line Design is a group of methodology and steps to design the flexible production line which follows the lean production requirement.For the Planning Guideline, this paper introduced its 8 major steps, including project contracting, investment strategy and premise planning, DFMA, Value Stream Design, Scalable production system, Plan for product life cycle, Lean Line Design and Flow oriented layout. Then we look into details about the investment strategy and premise planning for new product development phase, and also about the lean line design by detail steps and methods such as premise analysis, data calculation, operation loop design, layout design, line simulation…etc. At last, the paper summarized the case study and made prediction of promotion prospects.In general, this paper introduced the Planning Guideline and Lean Line Design methodology based on lean principle and case study. For sure the case is not the perfect one and should have improvement space, so we hope this paper cane be the reference and helpful for other related company or industry when doing lean system introduction.