DASSAULT AVIATION

The Dassault Aviation Group, founded in 1929, is a French technological flagship that designs and manufactures military aircraft, business jets and space systems.

Its Argonay site produces all the flight control systems (mechanical, hydraulic and electrical).
One of the production units specializes in the machining of very high precision parts. It is in this unit that the CONWIP control system has been deployed.

DASSAULT AVIATION in 3 figures

10000

planes sold in 90 countries

sites

12500

employees around the world

Expectations

The manufacture of the drawers and folders that make up the flight controls is extremely demanding and requires many successive operations.

Moreover, the number of different references manufactured on the lines is important, making the daily management of the whole very complex.

In this context of high technicality and high variability, the management of DA d’Argonay wished to improve the industrial performance of the workshops, and of the assembly line immediately downstream.

The objectives were therefore to deploy a management system adapted to the complexity of the products, but also simple to use on a daily basis, and providing both gains in competitiveness and good visibility on the field.

Solutions

The production lines for drawers and folders could not be takt because of the significant differences in routing time from one reference to another. They could not be piloted in Kanban either, because the number of article codes manufactured is too high.

The CONWIP (CONstant Work In Process) method was chosen as the pull flow method adapted to the demanding context of the sector.

In concrete terms, these are pockets containing the manufacturing files that serve as Conwip tickets. These folders are stored in boxes that represent the different stages of the routing paths. The workers remove the folder from the box, perform the operation and transfer the folder to the box of the next operation.

The nominal in-process level at each stage has been calibrated with the WipSim simulator. Thus, the appearance of a floating bottleneck is immediately detected.

The control of the total number of boxes in circulation makes it possible to control the total work-in-progress, and thus to limit the crossing time. The state of health of the line and its possible points of accumulation are visible permanently by all.

Project approach

The project began with a visit from the management of the production site of a Swiss watch manufacturer where we had deployed a Conwip system under similar conditions of complexity.

The process was then unfolded in two stages:

a feasibility study with a seminar on the basics of the Conwip method for the project team,
a deployment phase: modeling of ranges, simulation of optimum work-in-process levels, design of management tools and training of workers.

After this first successful experience with Conwip and the box system, Dassault Argonay switched to digital control with our SmartWip digital panels.

Results

The main gains announced by the teams are the following:

20% reduction in crossing times, thanks to an equivalent reduction in work-in-progress,
Better understanding of the flow,
Shared vision of the hard points between the different actors.

“The move to digital should help us to make even more relevant decisions, to better project ourselves, and probably to gain even more on the cycles” Olivier Buchet, Project Manager.