P
lanning Success story
Eurocopter flies high with Preactor
T 34
he Eurocopter Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of EADS, the merger of the Group Aerospatiale (France) and the Deutsche Chrysler Aerospace (Germany). In
2009 Eurocopter had a global turnover of around €4.57 billion and delivered 558 aircraft, 65 per cent of which were exported. A market leader with a share of approximately 51.2 per cent of the world helicopter market, Eurocopter has three plants in France, Germany and Spain employing some 13,700 people.
The company has three main businesses which are Research & Development, Manufacturing & Assembly, and Services & Support and offers a wide range of aircraft designed for the civil and military markets with some models, such as the Dauphin being multi-use. The time of average manufacturing time will depend on the model and the finish required. Typically it will average 6 to 7 months from the order while a more complex product such as the Dauphin will take around 12 months to complete today. Two years ago this would have been 24 months.
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT March 2011
Francis Bonlieu became responsible for the Dauphin line improvement group three years ago. “Our mission was to review all of the Dauphin manufacturing processes and significantly reduce the assembly cycle times,” he said. The line had suffered from lack of investment and needed to be upgraded to promote the Dauphin and maintain its competitiveness in anticipation of its successor. A thorough study of the current system revealed that, in addition to the Dauphin assembly line not being optimised resulting in the late delivery of many orders, parts for assembly were also delivered late to the line. This in turn delayed the assembly process. It was also apparent that original objectives of the project ‘Cycle Short Dauphin’, which required a reduction in the cycle time from 30 weeks to 12, were not feasible.
Optimising the assembly process
The response was a decision to optimise the assembly process by applying Lean Manufacturing methods to reduce costs of
assembly by 10 per cent and to reduce the average assembly cycle time of a Dauphin helicopter to 16 weeks. Eurocopter uses Lean Manufacturing throughout the Group using EPS (Eurocopter Production System) based on principles of the Toyota Production System and commenced the project in April 2007, completing it December 2009. To achieve the company’s goal, it had to go further and take into account all of the constraints at every level of production. “We became aware of a great deal of lost time in changeovers on machines and in the search for lost documents,” said Bonlieu. “We needed to smooth the flow of work so that components would arrive in time to the assembly lines. We had looked at how we could manage this in SAP but very quickly came to the conclusion that SAP is not helpful for detailed scheduling. SAP schedules but does not sequence. We started to use Excel but very quickly we have reached the limits of this solution. We had to look for a solution that was specialised and dedicated to this type of problem. So I created a set of data which would simulate our needs and passed this to a dozen companies”.
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