Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Application of the SMED methodology through folding references for a bus manufacturing company

2023; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.24867/ijiem-2023-3-335

2683-345X

Asel Juárez-Vite, José Ramón Corona Armenta, Héctor Rivera-Gómez, Óscar Montaño-Arango, Joselito Medina-Marín,

Flexible and Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems

Application of the SMED methodology through folding references for a bus manufacturing company 1. IntroductionCurrently, the global market for the transport industry raises the need to prepare for competition and thus integrate the new parameters of opening, integration, and trade regulations, both in local and international markets, considering the existence of the great number of players improving and maintaining their position in this market.Highlighting the weight that this sector represents within the economy, whose main and strategic function lies in the fact that it is the automotive vehicle that moves the activity of the countries.In this global competition, several bus companies such as Bus, Zhengzhou Yutong, Xiamen King Long Motor, Toyota, Tata Motors, Volkswagen, BYD, Marcopolo, Anhui Ankai Automobile, CNH Industrial Daimler, Ashok Leyland Blue Bird, Hyundai, Navistar, stand out as key players.Who operate, on different fronts, usually classified in the following blocks: North America (the United States, Canada, and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, United Kingdom, Russia, Italy, and the Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and the rest of South Amer-Bodywork assembly in bus manufacturing is a task that involves several operations.In Mexico, many bus manufacturing companies have non-flexible production lines, which makes model change very problematic.In response to this situation, the SMED methodology was applied to make more flexible production lines in terms of setup reduction for model changing.In this paper, the urban bus assembly line was studied, which is composed of sub-assembly stations that subsequently feed the station that assembles the unit, and that joints all the frames of the required model, the aim of the paper is to propose an approach to reduce the production time through the use of folding references.With the application of the SMED, it was observed that the production line improved in the transition from one body structure model to another, obtaining results of 56.2% in the time reduction.