Colloquia

Summary

Thermal2 is a business which produces aluminium windows and doors by processing imported aluminium profiles and assembling these. The extent in which methods inspired by lean principles can apply to small job shop businesses with a large amount of manual labour is explored. A selection of methods inspired by lean principles have been applied in order to get a full understanding of Thermal2’s production steps. Various wastes are identified and ways in which workflow can be altered in order to minimize or eliminate these wastes are introduced. The total flow of materials needed to facilitate current production is quantified. Redesigns of Thermal2’s layout are introduced in order to realize the elimination of the aforementioned wastes within the production itself and the wastes that come from internal material handling. A brute-force method is used in order to calculate reduction of walking distances. Because workstations get added in different scenarios, this is done for each of three scenarios which were considered in this report. The first scenario looks at minimal investments and serves as a baseline of what can be achieved by changing the workflow and eliminating wastes where possible. The second scenario alleviates the bottleneck of the CNC machine by investing in a secondary CNC machine. The last scenario considers the investment into an expanded hall to install a crane for an export bay. This would allow material to flow without any tracking back on itself. The second and third scenario would also allow production to be ramped up significantly because of the two CNC machines. Cost and benefit calculations are presented for each scenario. Each scenario also contains a roadmap describing in short what steps would need to be taken to reach the scenario, what investments need to be made and in what timeframe these changes are expected to happen.