arrive at Austintown’s 54 receiving docks. Most parts come
in reusable plastic containers or metal racks designed specifically for the individual parts they hold.
Receiving personnel scan the suppliers’ labels on incoming containers and conduct a visual inspection. The containers are then assigned a “license plate” in receiving,
which is scanned into the Streme system. The WMS determines whether the items will be cross-docked or sent to
storage areas, where they are stacked on the floor or placed
into pallet racks for short-term storage. The storage areas
are scattered throughout the building—either close to the
docks from which the products will depart or near areas
where the items will undergo further processing.
Some parts, especially those from
international suppliers, arrive in cartons. These are either repacked into
plastic containers for delivery to
Lordstown or sent to kitting areas,
where they are combined with other
parts to form kits (for example, a kit
that includes the pieces needed for an
emergency tire jack set). The kits are
then placed into containers for lineside delivery.
Austintown also provides management services for the containers and
the metal racks. The company gathers
empty containers at Lordstown and
returns them to the vendors. Right
now, there are 114 different types of
containers within the container management program, and the Austintown
facility handles an average of 14,000 empty containers daily.
START YOUR ENGINES
Production takes place 24 hours a day, five days a week.
As parts are consumed in Lordstown throughout the day,
GM electronically delivers, or “broadcasts,” lists of replenishment parts it needs for assembly. Comprehensive has
about 80 minutes to gather and deliver bulk parts to lineside positions in the plant. Most of these parts are already
packed in containers or loaded onto pallets, so it’s a matter
of gathering them and placing them onto trucks that shuttle
them to the Lordstown facility.
The Austintown facility has 42 outbound docks, where
containers are loaded onto the trucks in reverse sequence
to the order in which they will be used on the produc-
tion line. Falcon Transport Co., a sister company to
Comprehensive, provides the transport services using stan-
dard 53-foot trailers.
As for the tracking of materials throughout the day, the
Streme system provides GM with full visibility into the
status of Austintown’s parts processing operations as well
as products in transit. GM, in turn, shares information on
inventory on hand at Lordstown so that Comprehensive
can prepare for what parts will be needed next. Lordstown
typically keeps only about four hours’ worth of materials
on site.
“Streme provides us with an animated representation
of everything we have in inventory and in process in real
time,” says Steve Olender, vice president of information technology at
Comprehensive.
Many of the parts require specific
sequencing to match the build order
of individual cars. In the case of these
parts, workers receive picking directions via radio-frequency (RF) units.
If, say, a door panel pad is needed,
the RF device will first tell a worker
which part to pull from a rack of panels. At that point, the system prints
a part label, which the worker scans
and applies to the part. The RF device
then tells him or her which slot in the
12-slot shipping rack to place the part
into so that the items will be in the
proper sequence for assembly. The
worker next scans the slot in the rack
to confirm that the right part was placed there. Conducting
four scans for a single pick might sound like overkill, but
Comprehensive believes it’s necessary to ensure ultra-high
levels of accuracy.
CHANGE IS A WAY OF LIFE
Most people would be surprised at how much continuous improvement goes on in automotive manufacturing.
Engineers are constantly tinkering with the cars, making
incremental improvements. As a result, there are about 150
part changes every week that Austintown has to address for
Cruze production.
“The car gets better every single day. It is all part of continuous improvement, as we all want to make a better product,” notes James Kriner, the Austintown plant manager.
