Customer Profile

T. T. Assembly Systems supplies wheel and tyre assemblies to Toyota Motors at their manufacturing plant based at Burnaston in Derbyshire.

Business Type 

Automotive

Solution Summary

At Toyota's plant in Burnaston in Derbyshire, a car body rolls into the paint shop. At that moment a signal is sent to the Blue Sequence system on the factory floor of T. T. Assembly Systems approximately 25 KM away which instructs the production system what tyres and wheels that particular vehicle will need. The tyres and wheels are assembled, put on a pallet and loaded on a truck in a sequence that matches the cars coming out of the paint shop. As the newly painted vehicles roll into the wheel installation area their wheels are ready and waiting. The entire process taking less than three hours.

Business Issue

Prior to March 2002, the wheel and tyre assembly for Toyota Motors had been operated in-house at the main production plant at Burnaston in Derbyshire. The process was however, using unreliable equipment and suffered from lack of space. An async connection line went straight to a serial printer, which then printed the sequence request. The system although very basic was failsafe.

A strategic decision was made by Toyota Motors (TMUK) to outsource this aspect of production and a new company T. T. Assembly Systems was set up to run the operation. A greenfield site was found at Castle Donington and a new production centre was built incorporating some existing equipment that had been transferred from Burnaston to the new company.

T. T. Assembly Systems was able to use the experience gained by its parent Toyota Tsusho's USA operations after a similar strategic move was implemented there, although ultimately the UK operation chose not to copy the US system. The company had originally planned to use a European supplier but timescales were very short and the critical requirement was for a company that could very quickly understand the requirements and that would be able to deliver against a very short timescale.

Solution 

There are 2 elements to the IT system requirements, an ALC (Automatic Line Control) system and EDI both of which are accessed from a web browser which delivers a globally visible sequence production chain which can be monitored off site if necessary.

Zope has been used to deliver easy to use maintenance and reporting functions. All data is written into PostgreSQL, a database that is both 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 sequence processing application is linked throughout to match to a particular vehicle on the production line.

The ALC Production Control system processes data signals from TMUK and also incorporates EDI reporting as an add-on facility. After validating and processing the signal, a barcode label is produced and scanned into the wheel/tyre making equipment. T. T. Assembly Systems then has 3 hours from receipt of the signal to build and ship the wheel assemblies to TMUK while the vehicle is in the paint shop.

Key Benefits

• The system enables T. T. Assemby Systems to meet Toyota's 3-hour turnaround deadline.

• The early-warning capability considerably reduces production downtime.

• The automated system significantly reduces overheads by eliminating inventories

• Integrated browser provides ability to monitor operations remotely