Future manufacturing of midsize bearing

Abstract

A changing market where bearings industry has seen rise in terms of numbers with regards to industries developing and blooming. Opportunities have recently opened in terms of specific products demanding companies to redesign existing production lines in order to meet new production & sales directives. For the forseeable future bearings will have a continuous demand as industries where they are prevalent are either going to remain or even expand. In order to be able to sustain such endeavors the factories must be able to produce and deliver goods in a reasonable time frame to final customer. All this while the industry as a whole is undergoing radical changes terms of acclimatising to Industry 4.0. Further - gadgets, programs and new tools such as simulations have become more and more prevalent in terms of designing current and future production factories, creating better options for evaluation. This thesis will develop a future manufacturing site using simulation models and evaluate a future production site that currently has no equivalent. The project be gun with evaluation of existing production lines working alongside the stakeholding company. As the first hand model had been developed it was verified as credible with regards to producing results similar to existing manufacturing line. By doing so the model was established as a credible model and allowed for trust from said organisation to begin creating a future model as was the final goal of this thesis. Using this future model, experiments were carried out regarding appropriate buffers, batches, setup-, cycle times and product planning with regards to future output in terms of costs. Main takeaways from the project is that information input into exist ing system will vary widely based on who the contact person is, and thus it is needed to receive a wide base of statements and opinions in order to correctly validate a both credible but also accurate model. Same could be said for developing the future model, defining what the desired output is - beforehand - is of utmost importance as different parties and stakeholders expect different outputs from the project. In terms of the development of the production line it is intended to meet the absolute majority of the future requirements in terms of the proposed investments.