NISSAN “SHIFT EXPECTATIONS” WITH LANNER SIMULATION SOFTWARE

Published 4th March 2008

Sunderland plant increases production of new automotive models by 20 per cent using Lanner software
Background
Nissan Motor Manufacturing (UK) Ltd, (NMUK) is an automotive manufacturing plant in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. It is the largest car plant in the United Kingdom, and has regularly been recognised as the most productive in Europe.
In December 2006, NMUK began producing Nissan’s latest model, the Qashqai. Built on an all-new platform, the Qashqai will cater for those car buyers who want a more dynamic design but are not attracted to the large, aggressive nature of a sport utility vehicle. The car slots below the X-Trail in the Nissan range and partially replaces the conventional Primera and Almera.
Challenge
In a hugely competitive market, NMUK has to demonstrate excellent value for money when securing contracts for production of new models. New contracts to manufacture models can only be secured by providing the best manufacturing option in terms of quality, cost and delivery. NMUK faces competition from other Nissan plants globally and also from low cost countries in Eastern Europe where several major automotive manufacturers have recently established plants to provide low-cost propositions for the European market.
NMUK needed to optimise production processes for the manufacture of Nissan’s latest Qashqai model. In particular it needed to understand and map the role of its new suspension plant that was installed specifically for the manufacture of the Qashqai.
Simulation as a solution
In maximising the plant’s ability to produce the required volumes of the Qashqai, several options existed: traditional methods and simulation-led methods. Traditional Industrial Engineering methods include the creation of Man/Machine charts in order to understand the individual welding cells and standard calculations to determine the capacity using a planned system efficiency percentage. However this manual approach is immensely time consuming in manpower hours and therefore costly. When this approach was evaluated against a simulation-led approach, traditional methods simply could not compete with the depth of analysis that simulation technology is able to provide.

Building on a successful track record of using WITNESS simulation over many years Nissan’s first choice was to use the Lanner software for this analysis. NMUK have developed their own methodology for modelling large scale production lines. Firstly, small models are produced to look at particular cells in the line and improve the cycle times of particular processes, then the processes are all put together in a large scale model fed by the data from the smaller models. This model helps establish the overall plant’s ability to achieve volume requirements. This methodology was used and the variety of levels of WITNESS model were produced and analysed.
The simulation models took just a few weeks to develop to a stage where NMUK was receiving tangible results and identifying efficiency gains. The simulation technology is so effective because it is visual, interactive, it takes into account variability and users can see and understand why certain results are achieved with different control strategies and investment options.
The models built are used on an ongoing basis and are continuously updated to keep pace with developments at the plant. Hundreds of experiments are possible using frameworks such as the WITNESS Scenario Manager which automatically runs different experiments and explores the range of possibility. In this way great new options are evaluated and improved upon.
Benefits
The launch of the Qashqai vehicle has been extremely successful and has exceeded all sales expectations. This has resulted in the suspension plant moving on to a four shift pattern – running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Lanner’s WITNESS solution allows NMUK to test ideas to improve the plant without having to stop the plant running, which simply isn’t an option due to the volume requirements. From this point of view the cost savings generated as a result of the solutions are huge.
As an established user of Lanner’s WITNESS, the degree of support NMUK now requires from Lanner is the help desk function. Lanner ensures that there is always someone at the end of the phone who can answer queries directly or review a model that is emailed to them
NMUK has an ethos of developing models that are user-friendly as well as being mathematically accurate. It is vitally important that the model looks like the area/system that is being simulated in order for the user to fully buy-in to the simulation. This has been further enhanced on this project by the animation of turn-tables and seven axis robots that had previously not been done before. The seven axis robots have been added to the standard NMUK start up model as they will be useful in future projects.
In addition, NMUK has recently adapted the model to be used in conjunction with Witness Optimizer. Part of the Suspension plant has the capacity to be set up in a billion different ways, which means that there are a billion different scenarios to maximise efficiency at varying degrees. However, this number of scenarios is obviously beyond the realms of comprehension for the human brain and yet Witness Optimizer is able to perform an intelligent search through the options in order to obtain a great solution for NMUK within an hour.
The next step for NMUK involves the need to boost the capacity of the Suspension plant in order to be able to meet the ever increasing customer demand for Qashqai. In September, NMUK employed an additional 180 members of staff to help push production of the Qashqai by a further 20 per cent. The Witness simulation will be a key tool in developing and validating proposals for increasing the capacity of the plant.