Transformation of a production/assembly washing machine lines into a lean manufacturing system

The scope of this work is the complete re-organization of production flow according to the Lean Thinking philosophy for the industrial applications. The complete re-organization implementation of material flow management has been performed through the supermarket sizing which replenishment kanban logic has been adopted. To implement this strategy the goal is to achieve "Interdependent connected Processes" adopting the Pull System methodology in the Just in Time production environment. From the narrow sense the JIT manufacturing philosophy is to produce the right quantity at the right time with the right quantity level. In JIT the production is triggered by a kanban signal, which comes from the costumer order or the master production schedule, the signal then flowing backwards. By implementing JIT concepts in manufacturing, many of the practitioners experience advantages such as shorter lead times, fewer inventories, and higher quality. In the case study, developed in the Whirlpool Europe Naples factory, we have a first stage that consists of sizing the amount of "Kanban reintegration" codes, and the second stage in which we have simulated with ARENA and verified the progress of production flow in the hypothesized system, that has underlined the improvement of the business performances and great flexibility.

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