The Lean Application Improvement In Critical Line Of SPWAEC

Lean production came from the Toyota way.After established in 1990 s,this theory was dramatically developed,and has become the management bible of almost all companies in the world.Lean production is very successful,but how to apply lean in aero-engine manufacturing industries is still a challenge,South Pratt & Whitney Aero-engine Company(SPWAEC)is a specialized aero-engine component manufacturer.Critical rotor manufacturing line(critical line)of SPWAEC is a typical aero-engine part manufacturing line with lots of outstanding characteristics of aero-engine industries,e.g.,frozen operation,too long change over time due to machining center implementation,too much operations and cycle time variation.All of these are disadvantages of lean implementation.On the other hand,accompany with the increased competition due to globalization,critical line and SPWAEC weres forced to implement lean in production to gain more order by shortening lead time,reducing manufacturing cost and improving quality.Due to this situation,based on researching on Toyota Production System,and Lean theoryand fundamental manufacturing conditions of critical line,this article selected batch flow instead of piece flow.Applied batch quantity definition,EPEI definition,manpower adjustment and machine capacity allocation to make batch flow come into true;use FIFO and supermarket to connect different operations and achieve pull system & WIP quantity control;use finish part store and inventory strategy to balance customer order variation.After lean improvement,SPWAEC critical line made lots of achievements,L/T was shorten,lots of other KPIs were also improved.On the other hand,the employee 's understanding and confidence to lean were enhanced.