Product Families Development and Simulation of Well Completion System Products by Using Business Simulation Software

Particularly, high - mix, low - volume manufacturing industries such as companies that produce Christmas Tree components are very common these days. Being in high product mix, process flow is hard to be seen when products have a multitude of options, variations in production lead times. Besides, manufacturing organizations will also be constrained on capacity issue. Resources have to be shared and it is difficult to dedicate equipment to any specific of product. Productive manufacturing industries should have a total understanding on how their production system is performed so that the right product families can be developed. Inaccurate product families might result in creating more wastes such as bottleneck which eventually a longer production lead time will be required for a product to be manufactured. This project paper is about developing a new model of product families for a manufacturer that produce Christmas Tree components. The new model of product families is expected to reduce the production lead time. Product families that have been developed will be simulated by using Business Simulation Software – WITNESS. A new model of product families will be compared with existing product families. The new model of product families will be accepted if production lead time can be improved by five percent. The methodology of forming product families will be based techniques discussed by Duggan (2012) – Creating Mixed Model Value Streams.