New Operational Availability Model to Evaluate Manufacturing Throughput: Advanced TPS for Global Production

To achieve simultaneous, worldwide high quality assurance and other global production developments, today's task is to maintain high reliability in production facilities and operations. In response to the increasing expansion of overseas plants, it is necessary to improve and maintain highly accurate production equipment and operations through the development of intelligence operators. The authors have clarified Advanced TPS as a global production technology and management model designed to realize high quality assurance in global production. Manufacturing throughput (Throughput) is oriented toward the reduction of time required by the manufacturing process, so that the profitability can be increased. Therefore, the authors have recognized the operational availability a key indicator in order to evaluate the throughput. This paper will introduce a new operational availability model to identify 1) the development of throughput to link the impact from one step to following step and 2) the contribution of each factors and each step for manufacturing process to pinpoint the bottleneck of the throughput. With improvement to these bottlenecks, the business will be successful while minimizing cost. The effectiveness of this system has been verified at the Toyota USA.