Understanding Mixed-Model Line Design
The purpose of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Demand Flow Manufacturing is to design flow lines for producing families of similar products. The mixed model Demand Flow line can produce a range of volumes of any product within a mixed model family on any day, based on actual customer demand.
Line design uses demand data in combination with detailed information about the manufacturing process to calculate the logical production line design that is required to manufacture products in a flow. To complete a line design, you must calculate these values:
Operational cycle time or Takt: the calculated target of work content time to be performed by a person or machine in a Demand Flow line or cell.
Number of resources (machine or labor) that is required to support the line.
Number of operations that is required to support the line.
Number of pieces that is required for batch-driven machine operations.
In-process kanban sizes as visual signal that indicates when work must be performed in a Demand Flow line.
Total product cycle time: the calculated work content through the longest path of the processes that are required to build a product.
Actual time for completing all the processes that are required to build a product.
Actual time weighted based on demand at capacity for each product and process combination.
To create a mixed-model line design, you set up a mixed-model family of products that you want to produce on the line. To accommodate the variations between these products, you define all the processes that are required to produce all the products and combine them into a product synchronization. The product synchronization enables you to concatenate the processes both in a graphical and tabular format. The graphical product synchronization is a diagram depicting the entire path, including feeder, rework, and option paths, that a product has to go through to be transformed from components into the final product. In the product synchronization, the system also calculates the amount of output, scrap, and throughput that are required to meet demand at capacity. After you have calculated the product synchronization, you create a volume design to determine what quantities of each product you want to produce based on demand at capacity and associate the volume design with the product synchronization. This association enables you to understand what quantities of each product have to be accommodated on the Demand Flow line in one day.
By creating a sequence of events for every process, you define the process steps or tasks that are required to complete each process. The resource times that you assign to each task are the lowest-level values that feed into the calculation of line design, total product cycle time, and operational definition. The system enables you to set up standard tasks and standard sequences of events that you can use to facilitate the sequence of events definition, but these are optional.
Based on the product synchronization and sequences of events that you created for all the processes in the product synchronization, you set up a process map that enables you to gauge the extent to which the products share processes. You can group products for production on the same Demand Flow line based on common processes. The system enables you to compare the total actual times for the different product and process combinations to further determine similarities that support a mixed-model line design.
When you set up a line design, you import the process map into the line design and calculate the actual time that is weighted for each process based on the actual times from the process map. The system also calculates the number of operations that is required for each process. You can adjust this value manually. The system also calculates Takt as part of line design. After the line design has been calculated satisfactorily, you can calculate the total product cycle time for all the products in the process map. You can also calculate the total product cycle time by product.
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Demand Flow Manufacturing provides you with a tool to smooth the flow of tasks across a process to ensure a balanced work flow. Operational definition enables you to assign tasks to operations based on a calculated operational index and the number of operations that are calculated by line design. You can manually alter the operational definition.
This flow diagram provides an overview of the task that is associated with creating a line design, showing where the output from line design is used:
