Virtualise your factory to make lean work

Lean thinking and IT go together 100%. People that view IT as having no place in lean don't understand that there's a lot more to lean than simplified, material movements, visual triggering and single piece flow." So says Tim Williams-Wood, manager of Jaguar and Land Rover's Virtual Factory Group. "We're a support group to all the core manufacturing areas at Land Rover and Jaguar. We produce simulations for manufacturing, design and verification – for assembly, for example, for pressed steel, for paint booth spray characteristics, robotic assembly line characteristics, for dynamic assembly confirmation and for human ergonomic simulation. "The point is we're producing risk-free environments for kaizen opportunities. We build a robust case for optimised improvements and put visualisation and training in place for them before moving a single item… Using virtual tools means that you don't have to go through the agony of having the equipment moved around over a weekend only to find your idea didn't work. Think of it as risk management." Indeed, for Land Rover and Jaguar, its virtual manufacturing is crucial to its lean programme and its future success in many ways. "It's about forward planning for all manufacturing operations," explains Williams-Wood. "So that's manufacturing feasibility and simultaneous engineering, but it also provides the link between plants, plant operations and new product development and engineering. "It's about ensuring that products are developed in line with the strategic thinking of the company and specifically in line with the direction for manufacturing itself – from the plant level up. It's also closely allied to visualisation and training." In short, it's about underpinning lean thinking in the most practical senses. "Think about product design," he suggests. "We need to ensure that its output is sympathetic with, and compliant to the manufacturing strategy. There's no value in having something that looks fantastic but isn't buildable. And that includes can it be built on this line with this quality, with this robotics, with this volume and with this mix of other products?" Ultimately, this is about being able to feed all plants with Land Rover Discovery and S Type Jaguar orders in the knowledge that the production processes will be optimal and robust. "It's about making our products workable with existing manufacturing systems. Today, you cannot divorce your product strategy from your manufacturing strategy. To do so is commercial suicide. You need to be sure that the fixed costs you build into an assembly plant, for example, can work for you for a very long time." For him, this is central to lean: "Lean in an assembly plant is about how you keep processes as common and simple as possible – but allowing for maximum model mixing. The goal is moving the maximum number of derivatives and models down the same fixed cost hardware. You have to maximise how many outputs your manufacturing investment can accommodate." And that applies to chassis, powertrain, body in white, the lot. Virtual engineering and simulation tools and techniques from the likes of Lanner, UGS, Tecnomatix – and Land Rover Jaguar has them all – are aimed at shortening design cycles, validation and ensuring that production compliance. Note also, that happens at several levels – from 3D shopfloor workspace simulators to what he terms 'the discrete event simulator', which examines the big picture plant investment issues in light of capacity, design, quality, run-rate and budget requirements at a macro level. "The point is we don't want to have to manage with high levels of inventory, so we use the systems to assess operations and provide optimal designs," says Williams-Wood. His view, in a world committed to lean, companies should be asking, how could virtual systems be supporting my business? "These systems can be of great value whether you are at one end of the spectrum in low volume, highly specialised production, or at the other in high volume, low complexity. "They are all transferable. Of course, the Ford machine is vast and our IT funding is as well. But anything is scaleable. Almost nothing of what we use is not commercially available. It's true that the tools do require specialist training and we have dedicated simulation engineers. But all that's available from consultancies too."