Build to Broadcast

Industry Challenges

OEMs expect just-in-time and in-sequence delivery. Today, the burden of building frames, axles, seats and other major automotive components to the specific requirements of the OEM and delivering them in the correct order from which they will be assembled lies with the tier one supplier.

Achieving a make-to-order manufacturing operation is especially challenging for a tier one supplier given:

• ERP and other business systems that receive the OEMs order don’t interface well with shop floor technologies that need that information to build the job and verify completion – and now this gap must be closed in real time
• Increasing number of components and sub-components resulting in a number of assembly variations
• Employees need help trying to sort out the details of the order – the days of building one color car as long as it is black are over

Building and shipping in sequence to match the customer’s order places an additional burden on production lines – different models and products must now be built on the same production line in a random order.

Build-to-Broadcast Best Practice

This I/Gear Build-to-Broadcast module accommodates make-to-order and other lean manufacturing initiatives. Advanced line sequencing processes are integrated with customer and supplier information systems enabling lot size of one manufacturing. The benefits include:

• Reduce inventory
• Changeover time is effectively zero as unique jobs stamped with a serial number move from station to station
• Increase efficiency
• Order-to-delivery time slashed

This is a sample screen shot of a broadcast receipt screen that shows the EDI history. The number is a trailer number the jobs are to ship in, the type is A = Automatic from Customer, M= manually entered, Time is when the broadcast was received by the system and the EDI field shows the actual data in the EDI transmission.

This next screen shows the job model types as they are queued to be sent to the line per the broadcast received above.