Analysis, modeling and simulation of the production processes for prototype bodywork components

This Master’s Thesis follows from three months of internship in an Italian company located in the area of Turin, called Eurodies Italia S.r.l. Eurodies produces prototype bodywork components for the most important automotive OEMs. After understanding how their industrial processes work, a modeling and simulation study was performed, with the target of providing the company with tools, methods and suggestions to increase its productivity. This Thesis reports such study, as well as the suggestions that may be useful for the company, and for other firms operating in such sector. The first chapter explains why a medium tier-2 company of the automotive sector is an interesting object for a Master’s Thesis study: several key figures of the European and Italian automotive market are reported, both at a financial level and at an industrial and society level. The second chapter focuses on the company itself, reporting and analyzing all the industrial and production processes that are needed to make a prototype bodywork component: starting with the activity diagram, all the tasks that are performed in Eurodies, from the construction of tools to the last finishing activity, are explained in detail. Subsequently, Chapter 3 reports some of the issues observed in the company, which this Thesis wants to help to solve. The possible causes of the reduction in productivity that affect Eurodies (and many other similar companies of the sector) are analyzed, in order to make clear why such work of modeling and simulating the industrial processes was meaningful. The fourth chapter starts from a brief description of FlexSim, the powerful simulation software used for our analysis. It then proceeds with a very detailed explanation of how the model of Eurodies was built on such software, starting from a simplified model and then introducing the actual full model. This chapter also contains the description of how time data about the duration of manufacturing activities was obtained and analyzed. Chapter 5 describes how the simulation activity was conducted, introducing the concept of “mix of components” being produced, and explaining how five different mixes were tested, in order to discover which type of mix allowed to spend the minimum amount of time on Non Value Added (NVA) activities. Finally, the sixth chapter reports and discuss the results that were obtained: mixes containing the lowest number of chassis internal reinforcement were the most performing. The Conclusion, then, explains that this Master’s Thesis, due to the partial inaccuracy of some data, does not want to provide exact results and precise prescriptions to the company, but it rather wants to suggest a tool (our model) and a method that can be successfully utilized to increase productivity in a company that produces automotive prototype components.