Chrysler increases revenue by $1m per day - without increasing costs

About the project

Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, The Fiat Chrysler Group operates 33 manufacturing facilities in four countries and employs more than 52,000 people.

The Brampton Assembly plant builds the Chrysler 300, Dodge Charger and Dodge Challenger with an annual output of 200,000 units.

With the release of the new models, a substantial rise in customer demand was expected. As a result, the plant was tasked with improving daily production rate from 930 to 969 units to meet this increase.

Steve Lin, a member of Chrysler’s simulation team, utilized Simul8's powerful manufacturing simulation software to study the line speed at Trim Chassis Final (TCF) and assess potential changes to increase the number of units produced each day.

How did Chrysler use simulation to increase throughput?

Chrysler's simulation team used a base simulation of their Brampton Assembly plant to understand the impact of changing line speeds. With each manufacturing plant having its own base simulation, process improvement changes can be easily made to any aspect of the simulation to help visualize the wider impact on the entire assembly process.

Initially, Steve and his team looked at low performing machines. Using Simul8, it was quickly identified that two specific stations were causing a production bottleneck. As these were automatic machines with no staff working at them, the team were able to use the simulation to look at what would happen if cycle times at these machines were decreased.

The simulation model enabled the team to rank all manufacturing lines based on their performance and easily identify the poorest performing lines to optimize and remove costly bottlenecks. After the first trial, these lines were ranked again and any new bottlenecks were identified. Further trials were then conducted to speed up the new bottleneck lines until the target had been reached.

The chart below shows that the Door Line, Sanyo Loop, Foam Booth and D3 processes were identified as bottlenecks because they had the least block and starve time.