1 M. Sc. [Engg.] Student, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Department, M. S. Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies, Bangalore-58
2Professor, Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering Department, M. S. Ramaiah School of Advanced Studies, Bangalore-58
Online published on 18 February, 2020.
Robert Bosch GmbH holds 71.8% stake in M/s Bosch Ltd., India. M/s Bosch Ltd., is a market leader in manufacturing of automobile components and has a very diversified product range like inline fuel injection systems, starters and generators, electrical drives to name a few. Newest in the stable is the Common Rail Direct Injection system for diesel engines.
Rail is the new product in the Common rail system to India. We were earlier importing this product from one of the plants in Germany and delivering to meet the demands of the Indian car makers. As a part of the localisation program in India, the supplier M/s Karnataka Turned Components, has been selected, capacities installed and supplies started. But the supplier was not able to meet the demand, hence the project has been assigned to the Automotive Supplier Development team, through the project team which was handling the localisation of the forging machining in India. This is when, we had to pitch in to identify the reasons for failure and eliminate them systematically. The scope of the project was to reduce the lead time of machining hot forged rails and hence improve the delivery performance to Bosch Ltd., from a machining supplier. The challenge was to identify the main causes for high lead time and delivery failure and eliminate them. The major issues identified as losses during the project were performance, availability of the bottleneck process for production as well as certain quality issues. The project also deals with the improvement of internal rejections as well.
Shop floor management cycle is a tool developed by Bosch to improve the OEE in the bottleneck process and hence the productivity. The identification of the bottleneck is done through Takt chart and then hourly monitoring is used to identify the losses further this data is analysed by the use of tools like pareto and other quality tools and real root causes are listed down. Later these causes are validated and appropriate actions are taken to reduce/eliminate them. The improvement in delivery performance from 90% to 100% has been found with increament in OEE on bottleneck process from 73%to 78%. Same time this study brought the reduction in inventory from 10 days to 05 days with reduced internal rejections from 56228 ppm to 19875 ppm.
