Renewable energies industry – wind turbines
The manufacture of foundation structures for wind turbines takes place on an order basis.
The lack of standards applicable to designing and equipping the towers (monopiles, transition pieces, onshore segments) forces the industry to draft and calculate the workload for Production from scratch and confirm delivery dates for the requested towers every time an enquiry is received from wind turbine manufacturers.
It is hardly possible to use empirical values to calculate the Production workload from one customer order to another.
What’s more, the configuration of the individual towers can also differ within the orders.
The problem:
It is often not possible to realise the contribution margins calculated per order, which leads to a deterioration in the company results.
The challenge is:
- Localising at short notice the main cause of the deviations in the production areas pre-cut parts, prefabrication, main production, conservation and final assembly for manufacturing plants with over 400 employees
- A lack of continuous recording of production data between the production areas
- Very rough order planning for the work steps that take place before Production (Work Preparation, Purchasing)
Solution (Lean TOC, 5S):
In collaboration with the foremen, production managers and plant managers, we perform the following activities in the production areas pre-cut parts, prefabrication, main production, conservation and final assembly:
- Localisation and prioritisation of the supervisor areas in the respective locations that have the greatest budget and schedule deviations and quality problems (reworking effort)
- The recording of all necessary production steps in the respective supervisor areas to localise the bottlenecks in the production areas
- Verification of the calculation of personnel requirements for permanent employees and temporary workers in the individual production areas based on the target requirements of Work Preparation and the bottlenecks (Lean TOC)
- Verification of the provisioning of resources and purchased parts in the corresponding production processes
- Recording of the individual transport and material movement steps in a spaghetti diagram
- Verification of planning with target availability times for purchased parts in Work Preparation and in Purchasing depending on the production status and the bottlenecks in production.
The result:
In collaboration with the corresponding team, it was possible to prevent budget deviations by introducing:
- Bottleneck-controlled production, personnel and purchased parts planning (Lean TOC)
- Lean 5S to reduce the time spent searching for resources
- The Lean Milk Run principle to reduce the time spent searching for purchased parts during the work
