Kitting implementation in an Engineer-To-Order High-Mix and Low-Volume productive environment: A case study at Ferrari S.p.a

The choice of which material feeding system apply to feed an assembly line, covers a main role in increasing the process efficiency. This choice must be weighted, considering both the industry intrinsic features and the productive environment under consideration. This thesis makes an overview about High-Mix and Low-Volume productive environments, which, being characterized by a great number of product variants, have to deal with many different components feeding the assembly lines. Especially in this productive environment, the practice of delivering the components to the assembly station is of critical importance in order to avoid the excessive increase in border of line (BOL) storage space and avoid useless activities for the operators. One possibility to deal with this kind of environment is the kitting material feeding system. In the literature, kitting is referred to as the practice of feeding the assembly line by sorting components basing on the assembly object for which they are required, gathering all the needed components in physical kits. In the thesis have been investigated the major benefits and drawbacks related to the practice of kitting and has been evaluated the correlation of kitting with Lean manufacturing principles. A particular attention has been paid on kitting implementation in Engineer-To-Order (ETO) High-Mix and Low-Volume (HMLV) production environment that constitute a particular environment, which has been less investigated, under this point of view, by the literature throughout the years. The outcome of the investigation is that the benefits of a kitting process is strongly correlated to the needs of the specific productive environment in which it is implemented. For this reason, it is required to study and analyze deeply the productive environment before implement kitting in order to design the kitting process based on the specific needs of the analyzed productive environment. The kitting project object of this thesis has been implemented in the composite department of Ferrari S.p.a. that represents for all intents and purposes an ETO HMLV productive environment. In the composite department happens the production of all the laminates that will be mounted on the racing cars, starting from the lamination, up to the final assembly of macro components. The long and complex production process is described in detail to make clear the environment in which the kitting project has been implemented. Furthermore, a detailed overview about the AS-IS situation of the production process is provided, together with the principal criticalities that have made improvement action necessaries. The proposed TO-BE solution deals with two levels of improvement. The first is related to the physical implementation of kitting, while the second is related to its correlation with the information system present in Ferrari. The integration of the practice of kitting with the information systems has been a fundamental point in the proposal of an efficient kitting system able to satisfy all the needs emerged from the AS-IS situation. To this purpose, a detailed overview about the proposed solution has been finally given, along with the benefits generated for the Company.