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Featured Story

DuPont Canada- AJAX PERFORMANCE COATINGS CONTINUES TO USE ProModel AS A TOOL TO SHAPE THE FUTURE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Goksin Yilmaz, DUPONT CANADA INC.

Goksin Yilmaz received his BS in Industrial Engineering and MBA at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Before joining DuPont Canada's Systems Engineering Unit in August 2000, he worked as a planning and logistics engineer for 8 years in electronics and automotive industries. He is interested in production planning and scheduling applications, JIT manufacturing, modelling and optimization.

ABSTRACT

The Performance Coatings plant of DuPont Canada in Ajax, Ontario, has been effectively using simulation to identify opportunities for increasing the plant's throughput. In 2000, after facing a new business opportunity, ProModel was used to develop the "Ajax Productivity Model" to identify feasible ways of increasing the production by approximately 50% without making capital investments. As an extension of this identification process, the plant decided to develop another simulation model for the dispersion process, which provides the main intermediate products for finished goods production.

APPLICATION SUMMARY OVERVIEW OF COMPANY

DuPont Canada employs more than 3300 people, has 8 plants and annual sales of Cnd$ 2.2 Billion and is a publicly traded company, with 76% of its shares held by E.I. DuPont. The business segments of DuPont Canada are Nylon Enterprise, Performance Coatings and Polymers, Specialty Fibres, Specialty Materials, Specialty Polymers and Films. Ajax Performance Coatings plant produces finishes for automotive assemblers and sub-assembly suppliers, heavy-duty truck and bus manufacturers, and auto body shops. The revenue growth for performance coatings was 17% in 1999. By the end of 2000, Ajax Performance Coatings recorded Cnd$247 million in sales (5% improvement over 1999.) More than 300 people work at the Ajax site.

CHALLENGE

Before 2000, simulation was used with substantial benefits in various projects, like changing the working/operating pattern and increasing filling capacity. In 2000, the plant used simulation again to identify ways to increase production capacity by 50% without making capital investments. Following the development of the Ajax Productivity Model, the highest value-adding process of finishes production, Dispersion, was determined to be another area where simulation can be used to achieve the following objectives:

  • To determine volume throughput, hours of utilization and bottleneck resources for the dispersion process for different finished goods output levels.
  • To have a user friendly and well documented tool to be used for:
    • Determining number of batches and volume by machine, operator and machine utilization, and direct labour cost per kilogram produced for various finished goods output levels,
    • Evaluating the feasibility of different work schedules for different workload levels,
    • Identifying areas of improvement and financial measures.

SOLUTION

With the continuous support of Ajax Leadership Team, a core team containing the dispersion area process specialist and modelers has been meeting regularly for model development. The model that has been constructed by using ProModel has the following input-output structure:

Since one of the major objectives of the model development is to obtain the capability to evaluate the capabilities of the dispersion process for different finished goods production levels, the "array" building element of ProModel has been extensively used to construct a Microsoft Excel based user interface. This user interface enables the model users to change the following constituencies of the model for different what-if scenarios:
  • Demand Arrival Frequencies
  • Ideal Process Times / Delay Distribution Parameters
  • Reject / Regrind Probabilities
  • Operator Skill Sets
  • Shift / Crew Assignments for Operators
  • Equipment Downtime Frequencies and Repair Times In June 2001, the users for the Dispersion Model started running different scenarios with the model tool set.
The feedback from the users is as follows:
  • They can define most of the different scenarios that they want to run by utilizing the user interface,
  • "The key information to be pulled from this model is how we can react to increasing volumes",
  • The default output view of the Dispersion Model tool set contains some selected statistics, but in several cases a need to customize the report has been identified in order to include other key performance indicators that are not contained in the "Selected Statistics" view defined as a component of the tool set,
  • The model will be routinely used, especially to evaluate capital project ideas,
  • The model will be mostly utilized as a verification tool for different improvement project ideas, but "result analysis may point us in directions we wouldn't otherwise have gone".
In other words, with the synchronized use of the Ajax productivity and dispersion models built in ProModel, Performance Coatings has a comprehensive tool set to shape the future of the business.