Process improvement in the production of electronic automotive contacts : economic assessment of reel sizes and derived proposal to reduce process costs

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze costs and benefits of reel sizes in the production of automotive contacts over the complete process chain. Derived from that a proposal for cost saving is provided. Thereby five specific high-volume products were analyzed in detail. Three of them were partly processed externally, the other two only internally. The size of intra-company reels strongly influences number of reels, contacts per reel, processing times per reel and costs for sub-processes. Todays state is that 640mm reels are used as handling units. Due to the higher material capacity of 800mm reels, the idea of using these reels has arisen. This shows advantages especially in internal and external electroplating processes, due to a reduction of cut-off points. Furthermore savings in the stamping process shows advantages, using 800mm reels. Savings in stamping are of qualitative nature. Using this savings reasonable would make the qualitative saving quantitative and improve potential savings by around 100,000€. Contacts must be shipped on 640mm reels because of the customers requirements. This leads to additional efforts for handling, adds costs for external logistics forwarders and influences staging efforts. One-time costs, for a transition of these articles, range between 2,588 and 18,624€ without changing transportation concept. Potential improvements of variable costs by transport racks are related with an additional invest. Nevertheless in fact the most favorable solution is a production on 800mm reels for all articles and transport racks for transporting reels to external electroplating providers. Total savings of all articles show a significant improvement. Based on the forecast for 2018, the detected solution results in yearly quantitative savings of 54,013€ minimum.