Optimization of product carrier and machine utilization in surface treatment

TK-Oberfläche offers its customers individual solutions for the surface treatment of a wide range of materials. The medium-sized company based in Bielefeld covers a wide range of finishing and coating processes. From the point of view of specialized production and in particular work preparation, this poses numerous challenges. The variety of products leads to long set-up times and also poses the risk of high stock levels. Due to the many sizes and shapes of the components to be processed, product carriers often cannot be optimally equipped. These and other restrictions lead to long throughput times and efficiency losses in production. The quality of sequence planning is therefore heavily dependent on the expert knowledge of employees.

The aim of the collaboration with the Fraunhofer IEM was to optimize product carrier and thus machine utilization. The aim was to formalize the implicit knowledge of the employees at the workplace and derive rules for loading. To this end, the orders of recent months were analyzed and clustered according to their size and shape, among other things. From this clustering, correlations and rules for assembly could be derived. Production was then simulated. This validated the optimization rules and made the effects of the placement rules tangible.