Customer Profile

Futaba Industrial UK Limited supplies a number of car parts including wheels houses and cowls for the Avensis and Corolla car models to the Toyota Motors factory at Burnaston Derbyshire.

Business Type

Automotive

Solution Summary

The Blue Sequence application processes data instructions from the main Toyota factory in Burnaston where the Corolla and Avensis cars are produced and ensures that the Futaba lines operate at very high levels of efficiency with little or no waste. This occurs because only parts demanded from the line in Toyota are produced and delivered in sequence.

The application area this system covers is sometimes referred to as “Demand Flow Manufacturing” or “Continuous Flow Processing”. The Blue Sequence system receives and verifies instruction signals received from the Toyota production line, from these the system produces packets of data that detail which specific parts need to be produced by the robot controlled weld cells at the Futaba plant. Bar coded labels are produced which ensure the right part is loaded in the right order and put in the correct truck for dispatch to the Toyota factory.

The sequence processing application is linked throughout to match a particular part to a particular vehicle on the production line.

Business Issue

The Blue Sequence sequence production system had the main aim of increasing the production of cars from the Toyota factory. Historically, the plant at Burnatson in Derbyshire was designed to manufacture the Toyota Corolla car with all the main parts being produced within the factory. When the business decision was taken to expand the production capability of the factory by having two separate production lines (historically the Avensis and Corolla were produced on the one line) the company was left with two options - to invest in a new build or to review the services provided at the site with the view to outsourcing.

A strategic decision was made by Toyota Motors (TMUK) to outsource the production of a number of car parts including wheels houses and cowls for the Avensis and Corolla car models. A new company Futaba Industrial UK Limited was set up to run the operation and a location was found at Dove Valley Park in South Derbyshire approximately 30 minutes away from the Toyota production line at Burnaston Derbyshire.

Since the Futaba plant opened in August 2005 the factory output has steadily increased to a daily average of above 98% with the Blue Sequence system handling over 5 million parts since installation.

Solution

The Blue Sequence production system is made up of 5 modules:- Automatic Line Control, Error Handling, Integration into Legacy Systems, Instructions to the Weld Cells and Bar-coded Logistics all of which are accessed from a web browser which delivers a globally visible sequence production chain.

Once logged into the web browser, which has been written with Ruby on Rails, the user can view all aspects of the sequence production system from the receipt of the initial data including make of car, body number and vehicle identification number to the final trailer unload details at the Toyota factory.

Since the Blue Sequence system is mission critical reliable error handling is vital. The Blue Sequence system has been programmed to recognize the signals it should receive and so if a code the system does not recognise is received it generates an alarm signal. It is then possible to locate the incorrect code and restart the sequence production from that point. The Blue Sequence user interface includes a dashboard screen which shows the system status of the servers, the logistics, the bar code label printers and the weld cells.

All data is written into PostgreSQL, a database that is quick and flexible ensuring that data can be stored reliably and reported back on easily.

The incoming signals, core signal verification and signal processing functions have been written in Python . The Python code also allows all information entering the system to be exported both to users (within Excel or to compatible spreadsheet formats) and/or to external systems using industry standard EDI technology to support the requirement for integration into legacy systems.

The software application runs on a Blue Box server which is a pre-configured server running Linux designed and developed by Blue Fountain Systems. The machine is installed as a recognized network node on the internal network at Futaba Industrial UK.

Key Benefits

• Supports “Demand Flow Manufacturing”
• Reduced inventory with minimal levels of stock stored
• Visible production, loading and shipment system
• Integrated browser allows operations to be monitored off site