Design Process to Reduce Production Cycle Time in Product Development

Abstract

In today’s business climate, the old adage “time is money” has been expanded to mean that time is competitive weapon. Today customer’s demands are quick delivery and good quality at reasonable price. When entering the global market the companies encounter several difficulties, the most important one being excessive time for new product development. Thus to perform in a global market, short lead times are essential to provide customer satisfaction. Lead time in manufacturer point of view is the time elapse between placing of an order and the receipt of goods ordered. There are various components of lead time such as setup time, process time, move time and waiting time. This paper deals with review of various tools and techniques to reduce lead time. This problem can be solved by transition from sequential engineering to concurrent engineering, A survey of published works in the field of designing teams in big companies has revealed that in big companies a three-level team structure is recommended, as well as a workgroup, consisting of four basic teams. Method study techniques use to examine current way of work and develop effective method base on elimination, combining, changing and simplification of activities. Various lean tools such as Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED), 5S, Poka-yoke, Kanban, Just-in-time (JIT), Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Jidoka, Cellular manufacturing etc. helps in reducing lead time. Also Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPII), Theory of Constraints (TOC) classic approaches of Production Planning and Control (PPC) are use to reduce Work in Process (WIP) and flow time.