2.1 The introduction
The topic
Whoever says “industrial car production” must also say “production process”. After all, the production of a modern car requires a large number of technical resources and employees. The production process determines how these two elements are organised to transform raw material into the desired finished state – or, more simply, how the cars are built at the end of the day in the factory.
To design the production process as sensibly as possible for a production line (for example, so that as many variants of a vehicle as possible can be produced in a single production line without interruption) there are two important starting points. One is process planning, the other is resource planning – this applies to all manufacturing industrial companies.
Especially in the automotive industry, the so-called “lean production” is gaining ground – a particularly systematised and integrated method of making the production process as efficient as possible.
As you can see, the design of a production process is, in a sense, the efficiency backbone of any factory, which must be comprehensively planned and implemented. The production process is also in close contact with other processes of a company (such as human resources management, logistics, research and development and other elements) and together with the work process and the business process of an industrial company forms the core of the so-called process chain.
In this learning unit, we, therefore, deal with the most important basics of the production process. You will learn:
- important elements and instruments around work and process planning
- planning strategies and planning methods
- coding and numbering
- the tasks of scheduling
- how the lead time is made up
- the most important terms of capacity and materials management
- methods and goals around material planning as well as working time organization
- the objectives of capacity management
- material requirements planning
- the basics of working and operating time organisation
- the principles of Lean production and associated tools
- the basics of the value chain and how to fundamentally reduce waste along it
- how the KANBAN system works
