Spicer Improves Its Lead-Time and Scheduling Performance
The Problem
The Spicer Off-Highway Products Division, a division of Dana Corporation, serves the off-highway vehicles market, including rough-terrain cranes, underground loaders, compactors, and other specialty vehicles. Its plant in Brugge, Belgium, makes drive train components for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). In the OEM market, success depends on technological competence and fast, on-time delivery. Dealing with small-volume production in a highly uncertain assemble-to-order environment, Spicer sought to improve due date performance and shorten manufacturing lead time — challenges requiring analytics expertise in integrated planning and scheduling, and stochastic programming.
The Analytics Solution
Spicer called on two analytics professionals at nearby Belgian universities, who successfully combined analysis, planning, and detailed scheduling expertise. The team modeled the manufacturing system as a queueing model, and used the model to analyze and evaluate improvement schemes (layout changes, product-mix decisions, lot-sizing decisions, and lead-time estimations). The team also developed a finite scheduler to improve the detailed scheduling of the shop.
The Value
As a result of the analytics modeling, the plant increased productivity by 27.3 percentage points, decreased manufacturing lead times by a factor of 2 to 3, increased its workforce by 41%, and decreased its operating costs. Said Karl Nitsch, President of Dana Europe, "Two of the most critical success factors to achieve total customer satisfaction in the markets that Dana Corporation competes in are short lead times and excellent on-time performance every time and all the time."
"This project shows how a coherent set of operations research [analytics] tools can help create a competitive advantage for this plant in particular. But I am convinced that other manufacturing plants will take advantage of this innovative approach once they have seen it."
