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Branch news: North-West - Enterprise resource planning Article
The article entitled: "Branch news: North-West" is in the Enterprise resource planning Articles section of Operations Management Papers area...
ARTICLE DESCRIPTION: Visit To Leyland Daf Trucks: A few weeks ago, a group of members from the North-West paid an afternoon visit to Leyland-Daf Vehicles at Leyland.
MORE INFO: Branch news: North-West Visit To Leyland Daf Trucks: A few weeks ago, a group of members from the North-West paid an afternoon visit to Leyland-Daf Vehicles at Leyland. The initial part of the visit was a trip round the spare parts facility. This is housed, with its own buyers and sales staff, in its own large modern building. In its own way, it was just as impressive as the vehicle assembly plant. Smaller parts were stored in bins in racks; larger parts were on pallets in racks. There were thousands of different parts and the place was impeccably clean. The ‘factory-within-a-factory’ layout, designed to minimise picking distances, and the rules for bin placement in racks to minimise bending had all been carefully thought out and implemented to give rapid same-day turn-around times to customer orders. Picking lists are produced so that a pick list will be restricted to one area of the warehouse and printed in appropriate picking sequence to minimise walking distances. To improve timeliness of system updating, the current bar code system was being supplemented by a wireless system so that stock movement could be captured on the inventory system immediately as the item is removed from a bin or pallet. The general work pattern was one of receiving and storing the incoming stock in the mornings and then focusing on order picking after midday. Orders received late in the day would be picked in the evening for despatch the following day. Daf agents are encouraged to consider the Leyland site’s stock as immediately available to them so that the agents do not need to tie up space and money in stock. Next day delivery is the accepted norm. We then moved on to the truck assembly plant. There is no planning requirement to batch similar vehicles for assembly. Trucks are assembled in the as-required sequence and the manufacturing batch size is always ‘one’. Each vehicle starts off as the two main chassis members and the cross-members, all pre-drilled to suit the specification of the vehicle. At this stage the chassis is upsidedown to allow easy fitting of the under-chassis parts. The sub-assembly is later turned over and put on the continuously moving track. From this point it takes nine hours to reach the end of the track as a finished vehicle. The necessary parts for each specific truck move to the trackside on a Just-in-Time basis and the finished vehicles are driven away from the end of the line. The rigid planning and scheduling allows very closely timed collection of the trucks and they will go off-site – typically within the hour - for the appropriate box, platform, etc to be fitted. Tractor units for articulated trailers would only require off-site customised lettering or other decoration on the doors, etc. The professionalism of the whole enterprise was apparent but, what stood out for me was the enthusiasm of the staff who showed us round, and the pride of the shop floor personnel who were carrying out a detailed inspection of a vehicle at the final inspection point. Thanks to all those who made our visit so pleasant and so interesting. Norman Lees, FIOM
PUBLISHER: Institute of Operations Management
Page number: 8 Word count: 1000
Vol 30 - No 04 June 2004
The article can be downloaded in full from the publisher's site i.e. the Institute of Operations Management.
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