Tire Industry and Its Manufacturing Configuration

This paper is intended to propose what manufacturing configuration (manufacturing planning and shop floor control) is suitable for the tire industry. Basically tire-manufacturing process is mixed-products, parallel-disconnected-flow-shop. Both throughput time and cycle tine are very short, the variety of tires is very high, the setup time is long, shop floor data reporting requirements is high, and there are many equipments and people working. And with no exception, tire industry also now confronts increasing requirements of delivery conformance with the above peculiar characteristics of tire manufacturing and changing market environments, this paper suggests, weekly master scheduling with no MRP is desirable and traditional kanban is right selection for shop floor control/scheduling. This paper describes why this configuration should be, using the manufacturing engineering principles and some new insights like four primitives of parallel flow shop. Generally known that shop with high parallel-product-mix and long setup time isn't good candidate for kanban. The four primitives of parallel flow shop explain why kanban is also useful scheduling technique in that environment.