University of Twente Student Theses
Increasing utillization by using autonomous production at a gear production company
Willems, M.C.M. (2022) Increasing utillization by using autonomous production at a gear production company.
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| Abstract: | This report explains the research conducted at Hankamp Gears, located in Enschede. Hankamp is a gear production company, which specializes in high-quality and tight tolerances, up to 0.001 mm. They produce orders with a batch size from 1 to 1,000 pieces and each order has its unique set of operations. Hankamp currently has to deal with higher customer demand without an increase in production capacity. Because of the increase in demand without an easy opportunity to expand the capacity, the delivery times increase. In some cases Hankamp even has to say no to customers. The action problem they encounter is that machines at Hankamp are fully booked with orders for months. They are looking for ways to increase their utilization rates. One way they do this is by implementing autonomous production by using the loading systems of the machine and in some cases collaborative robots (cobots). Next to that, they are looking into the possibility of autonomous night production. When an operation process is stable, the machine operator can decide to run the machine autonomously during the night. In that case the operator sets up the machine in such a way it can run some hours during the night without anyone being present. However, for the operators, it is not clear when it would be beneficial. What are the technical requirements and are there extra cost related to autonomous night production? Or does it result in extra downtime of the machine during the day? Therefore, we select “no clear conditions when it is beneficial to run the machine during the night” as the core problem for this research. Because of the limited time forthe research, we decide to focus on the current bottleneck, the hobbing department. The department has 7 machines, which, in theory, can run autonomously during the night. Two of these machines are combined with a cobot. We specifically look at two out of the six different machines to answer the question. The composed main research question is: Under what conditions is it beneficial to produce batches autonomously during the night so the capacity utilization is increased at the bottleneck department? |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Clients: | Hankamp Gears B.V, Enschede |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Programme: | Industrial Engineering and Management BSc (56994) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/92795 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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