The leveling

Abstract

Nowadays a company has to face up a tough competition. In order to strenghten its position in the market, it has to adopt modern methods in the production management, stock management, new lean processes in logistic transfers, etc. There are various new methods in the production management, one of them is leveling. The orders from the customer often fluctuate and these variations are stochastic. The changes in the orders have negative influence on the production planning. The production line utilization is not regular, the situations on line stop, overproduction or lack of capacity occur. In order to soften the negative effects of stochastic changes, a company can implement leveling as a tool of a production planning. Leveling relate to other tools of lean system – consumption managed inventory, quick change over, internal and external milkrun. The tool are to be introduced paralel. There is recommended action plan when a company decides to implement leveling. At the beginning it has to clasify the products whether they are runners or low sales parts. It has to define what is our leveling period (a period where all the production spectrum is planned to be produced). The responsible persons for the leveling and organization of the process have to be defined. All members of the leveling process are to be trained. When creating the leveled plan we split the customer orders regularly in the whole leveling period, which is fixed. We produce the runners every leveling interval in the same order. We use the empty windows to produce low sales parts (according to up-to-date customer needs). The visual management is to be prepared – we talk about heijunka tool. We put production kanbans into a heijunka and after the production a card of the heijunka is taken and stuck to the packaging unit of the final product. When a final product is sold, the kanban card is returned to heijunka. The production line utilization after leveling implementation is regular and the production process is stable. We can adopt standardized work in all work places and the production lead times are shortened. The positive effects occur not only in the production process. We see the effect also in the logistics – mainly in the reduction of stock, regular orders to the suppliers and so better utilization of the transport means. The flexibility towards the customer is increased.