Quantifying and visualising wastes and losses in automotive production flows (across multiple plants and organisations) for increased accuracy in improvement prioritisations

Many companies are making use of continuous improvement in order to stay competitive. In businesses, the focus of continuous improvement efforts has often been on optimising the manufacturing processes within the company's own factory or scope of control. Therefore, they have not considered the impacts on and from other areas, because they have failed to see the entire system or manufacturing network of the enterprise. This paper is by using end end-to-end cost deployment identifying the major types of problems in an end-to-end production process within a large manufacturing firm to be able to guide the company how to direct their improvement efforts. The study is designed as a retrospective longitudinal case study using field data which was intended to be a representative flow within the heavy automotive industry. The study shows that, after normalisation, manual operating waste, planned maintenance and machine breakdowns are significant cost factors for the process studied, regardless of the size of the organisation or the complexity of the product.