This Master thesis was mainly performed at Electrolux Automated Equipment
and Tooling (AE&T) in Adelaide, Australia between September 2004 and January
2005. The aim with this project was to investigate the process and co-
operation of the areas CAD, CAM and CNC-machines at the plant and come up
with more efficient solutions. The outcome of the project is an investment
recommendation and organizational change.
The project has been performed at AE&T and finished in Sweden. The current
situation has been documented and analysed, literature has been reviewed,
benchmarking visits have been made, a questionnaire has been sent out and
the future situation and requirements have been analysed.
AE&T is a toolmaking company within the Electrolux concern. Though, its "to
be or not to be" has been discussed a lot during this last year. The plant
was out for sale during fall 2004 as it was not a part of the core business,
according to Electrolux. In December 2005, Electrolux decided to keep the
business in the concern anyway.
It is a tough situation for tooling companies at the moment and to be
competitive on the world market one has to have an optimal and efficient
organization, have skills and new technology, be suitable and helpful to
meet customer requests, be time saving and have a helpful system to support
the business. AE&T have the skills, but need to use them in the right place
of organization and update its technology.
Our recommendation is in two steps. The first is to train the CNC operators
to do the CAM at the shop floor instead of having a designated CAM
programmer. They also have to replace the old CNC-machines and increase the
total quantity to get higher capacity and more effective production hours.
The designers should become project leaders and together with a new
information- and planning-system make the manufacturing go smother with
lower lead times. The organization change will improve the motivation and
quality in work as well as in products. Another change is to employ missing
skills, like salesmen. Salesmen are needed to get more work to the shop and
fill up all the three coming shifts as planned in this solution. The
recommendation concerning the software is to keep the current solution, but
be prepared to change software to attract more customers and come by file
translation and rework and thereby also save time.
The second step is to buy a new set o...
