Emmerthaler: Consistent planning support with simulation in SMEs
Emmerthaler Apparatebau GmbH (EmmApp) in Emmerthal near Hameln is a medium-sized company with around 145 employees. Its product range includes industrial silencers, which are installed in blowers or compressors by the company’s customers.
Due to the strong increase in demand, the production capacity was to be increased from around 3,000 to 8,000 units, which made a factory expansion necessary. SimPlan supported the planning process from concept to detailed planning.
- Development of a concept for the extension building with the aim of
- achieving the increased output with an unchanged number of employees.
- Determination of the project goals and planning premises
- Carrying out the necessary data analyses (collection or preparation of order structures, processing times, set-up times, parts master data, parts lists, etc.)
- Development of rough concepts
- Investigation of the differences in the number of planned resources (workstations, welding cells, employees) as well as in the control principles and the allocation of component variants to resources
- Creation of block layouts for the visualisation of these rough concepts
- Evaluation of the rough concepts with the help of simulation models with regard to target variables such as output, resource utilisation, throughput times and stocks
- Transfer of the results into detailed and layout planning
- Development, evaluation and comparison of a number of factory layouts by means of simulation
- Refinement of the simulation with regard to the arrangement of buffers, workstations and welding cells
- Determination of the internal transports in addition to the rough planning and rough simulation (e.g. required forklift trips with the resulting personnel requirements)
- Continuous simulation support as part of the planning of a new factory has proven its worth in the case of Emmerthaler Apparatebau GmbH.
- Necessity for very intensive examination of order data, article structures and article parts lists – Opportunity to clean up the data stock
- Side effect: suggestions for product simplification in the design and development of silencers
- Production resources could be appropriately dimensioned (rough planning), layout was designed and gradually improved (detailed planning) and a clear control concept for the new production was created
- EmmApp will be able to achieve higher output with the same number of staff in the future
- New production structures, together with the product revisions influenced by the planning project, ensure that inventories in production are slightly reduced despite higher production numbers, and lead times are significantly reduced
