SAFRAN ELECTRONICS & DEFENSE

Safran Electronics & Defense is a French company specializing in optronic, avionic and electronic systems as well as mission-critical software for the civil and military markets, for land, naval, aeronautical and space applications.

Its Montluçon industrial site is specialized in the manufacture of inertial and electronic equipment and in systems integration.

SAFRAN in 3 figures

276

implantations

countries

83000

employees

Expectations

After having successfully deployed many Conwip loops on several lines of the site, Safran Montluçon has decided to switch its Mechanics Industrial Unit to Conwip pull flow.

This IU groups together more than 100 journeymen around the main mechanical trades: milling, turning, grinding, electro-erosion, 4- and 5-axis machining, deburring, cleaning, painting, surface treatment and heat treatment, dimensional control, etc.

The number of different references processed per year is high (around 800) and it is difficult to group families of parts with homogeneous trajectories. The organization is in job shop. This workshop receives many parts from other lines on the site, as an internal subcontractor. The challenge of controlling the lead times of this IU is therefore important, even beyond its own perimeter.

Solutions

The Conwip pull flow was the best control method in the context of the high variety of the manufacturing of the Mechanics Industrial Unit.

The large floor space of the workshops and the large number of employees involved in these flows militated in favor of a digital solution. This made it possible to limit travel thanks to the multiple access points to the visual management control panel.

The digital panel was also connected to the ERP in order to directly transcribe the progress declarations made on SAP.

Project approach

A feasibility study first demonstrated the possibility of grouping the vast majority of the Mechanical Unit’s flows in an macro routing whose length remains compatible with a Conwip mode control.

However, the realization of this main Conwip loop remained complex due to the very high number of references, the heterogeneity of the trajectories and the important number of resources that are regularly preempted by the load related to internal subcontracting.

For this large-scale project with very high strategic stakes, the Safran team mobilized two black-belts alongside the Wipsim team.

The project was carried out in collaboration between Safran and Wipsim, leading to the deployment of a SmartWip control panel connected to the SAP ERP throughout the perimeter.

Results

“The deployment of the CONWIP approach within the Mechanics industrial unit has enabled us to bring our work-in-progress under control and to clarify the trajectories of the different references manufactured.

In terms of results, we have achieved a reduction in work-in-progress of around 30%, which has enabled us to ensure better control of our throughput times and, ultimately, to guarantee more reliable product output forecasts in line with customer needs.

From an organizational point of view, given the extent of the scope and the diversity of the business job shops, the SMARTWIP tool allowed us to obtain a global view of the work in progress on the shop floor while offering accessibility on each group/workshop with the possibility of personalized views allowing for better management of blocking points and bottleneck stations.

This tool appears today as a major focal point for all the contributors (Workshop, Supervision, Quality, Supply chain) in the achievement of a common objective: to ensure the output rate of the manufactured products in connection with the customer’s needs. “

Alexandre BILLY & Mélody ROBELET (Black Belt Safran)