A study and analysis on production engineering focusing on quality and life cycle in the automotive industry

Production delays are significant problems for the loss of goodwill of the customers and the loss of profits associated with them. The delays may accrue as a result of insufficient resource planning and poorly designed unsatisfactory procedures. The life cycle of automotive technology is defined here to include all the steps required to provide the fuel, to manufacture the vehicle, and to operate and maintain the vehicle throughout its lifetime up to scrappage and recycling. Production planning and control is a critical task for companies to minimize costs and increase customer satisfaction with timely product delivery. In this study, a real-life problem for an automotive industry company is investigated in terms of improving the production processes and increasing effectiveness. A delay problem for the hydraulic compression garbage collector production department of the company is experienced, which is the most demanded product in the company, and it is subjected to some penalties due to late delivery of the end products. The company is affected by this problem as a loss of prestige and high cost. The problems in the plant are identified by the analysis of the system in the production facility and the company feedback. Different tasks in production can be assigned to different routes. The priorities among tasks can be changed depending on the make-to-order system and the stock status. It is observed that some of the workers in the production area are not assigned the appropriate tasks considering their abilities and positions, while some of them are idle. This situation affects the productivity and quality of production and causes delays. Delays in the plant grounds penalty costs for the company and end with the loss of some of the customers. This paper presents a new quality- and lifecycle-oriented approach of integrated production engineering in automotive industry. In a first step, current production engineering projects are analyzed and present methodical, information-technical and organizational challenges regarding the project phase of concept planning are depicted. Based on this, existing industrial- and research-oriented solution approaches are illustrated and critically evaluated. Considering the weaknesses of these solutions, this paper introduces the new developed quality- and lifecycle-oriented production engineering approach. As one key issue of this new planning approach, the idea of using a model- and rule-based configuration system is presented.

Keywords:

production engineering , quality management , lifecycle management , data integration