Gantt Technology: A Lean Manufacturing Solution

Hypothesis

The organizations operating in the manufacturing industry today require to integrate, manage, and synchronize their activities to survive in the ever increasing global competitive market. Scheduling the tasks is one of the challenges faced by the management of the organizations and it is even difficult for an efficient algorithmic systems used by the organizations. The production facilities require the scheduling of their task more as compared to other parts of the industry (Baecker, 2012). There are numerous variables that can emerge at daily basis in the production facility. So, the tools used at the production facility should facilitate the lean manufacturing of the production facility.

Manufacturing facilities have the responsibility to schedule their tasks considering the fact the profit margins are small for such activities (Baecker, 2012). The production schedules can be minimized with the use of visual Gantt technology embedded in the system used by the manufacturing facility. The organizations should develop a perfect system which can correctly predict the activities with a larger accuracy, and is able to streamline the activities taking place in supply chain, and shipping procedures (Baecker, 2012).

In this project we will evaluate the Gantt Technology systems according to the eight wastes in the lean manufacturing:

1. Overproduction: The organization is producing more produces than required in the market resulting in the waste of production and inventory resources (Pradhann et.al, 2017).
2. Inventory: The accumulation of finished products or the raw materials required for the production is known as inventory. Inventory can increase the time taken in the production and other processes (Pradhann et.al, 2017).
3. Waiting: People, materials, or machines are waiting for each other or a machine is waiting for a product in a working state (Pradhann et.al, 2017).
4. Movement: The movements of the people and materials which are not required in the production facility can result in excessive time and wastage of resources (Schuh et al., 2014).
5. Over-processing: The processes which do not have any direct impact on the final product or service and thus resulting in the wastage of efforts (Smith, 2014).
6. Motion: Does not add value to the product or services resulting in the waste of resources.
7. Correction: Additional labor and resources are required for making corrections or repairing any product/machine thus resulting in the wastage financial and human resources (Smith, 2014).
8. Underutilization: Not utilizing the people or machines to full potential results in the wastage of financial and managerial resources (James, 2005).
   • Aims and Objectives
9. Studying the scheduling challenges faced by the production facilities at global level.
10. Review the importance of lean manufacturing in the industries.
11. Reviewing the best practices employed to meet the scheduling challenges.
12. The use Gantt Charts and their implementation in the production facilities.
13. Develop a revised and authentic Gantt Char application for implementation in the production facility.

Overview of Scheduling Challenges

Scheduling of manufacturing processes is one of the most important challenges faced by the organizations today. The efficiency of scheduling processes have a direct impact on the top and bottom line of the organization (Alaskari et.al, 2016). The complex nature of supply chains and manufacturing processes are increasing by a passing day. The production scheduling can be affected by the factors explained by the figure “1”:

 

Figure 1: Factors Affecting Production Scheduling.

Many programs have been developed to address the challenges faced in the production scheduling. Today, there are several software solutions which can address the mentioned problems at the site (Alaskari et.al, 2016). Despite their numerous differences, they have one in common which is the graphical visualization of the project plan.

Visualization as a Solution to the Problem

It has been proved from the practice that most of the challenges faced by the manufacturers are resolved by the implementation of the proper visualization techniques. With the help of visualizations, the management can identify, and eliminate the problems (Alaskari et.al, 2016). Such visual solutions have also facilitated in achieving the goal of lean manufacturing having a positive impact on almost every sector of the organization.

Gantt Charts

The transparency of the Gantt Charts has enabled them to display the data required on the hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly basis. These charts can provide the visual aid to the manager to resolve the problems in the routine of manufacturing (Genua et.al, 2006). The tables can be easily manipulated to attain lean manufacturing objective.

Highly Regulated Industry

The industries like aerospace, heavy equipment, and automobile manufacturers are considered as highly-regulated industries due to several local and international regulations imposed on their daily operations (Genua et.al, 2006). The components used for the production have to follow strict criteria set by the industrial authorities and data regarding their tolerance, specifications, and origin should be complete. The national and international authorities present for such industries can quickly terminate the production of the company if they find non-compliance with the standards (Crookall, 2010).

Literature Review

Due to above mentioned factors, one can conclude that production scheduling in such industries is highly complicated. With the adoption of Gantt Chart technology managers of such enterprises can identify the part, its origin, its certification as the raw and final product delivered to the client. Thus it can be seen that Gantt technology reduces time and costs of production inform fines (Genua et.al, 2006).

Apart from making the production procedure transparent and visible to the managers the Gantt technology is also able to identify the foreign objects in the production facility. Resource charts available in the technology can visualize each worker, workstation, and machine involved in the manufacturing process. The managers can quickly identify and eliminate the introduction of foreign objects in their facilities (Genua et.al, 2006). The following diagram can represent an instance of FOD (Foreign Object Damage):

 

Figure 2: FOD Detection using Gantt Technology (Genua et.al, 2006).

The integration of procurement information provides a valuable tool for controlling of inventory level in discrete manufacturing industries (Genua et.al, 2006). The ability to visual positions of current stocks and purchase order charts enable the managers to deal with the issue of overstocking. The creative visualization provided by such programs also reduces the inventory price and reduce the inspection costs by providing the relevant data of the items in time (Genua et.al, 2006).

Made to Order Production

The made to order production industries face similar but more complex challenges than discrete manufacturers. For lean manufacturing achievement in such sectors, the factors like change and alternations of the orders should be dealt with quickly by integrating them in the current production process (Klemes et.al, 2005). With the help of Gantt technology, the made-to-order process of an organization can be synchronized with other operations providing graphical visualization. The technology can break down the production infrastructure required for an individual order. This enables the manager to visualize the deadlines and alter the production according to them. It can dramatically increase the customer satisfaction rates (Klemes et.al, 2005).

 

Figure 3: Made-to-Order using Gantt Charts (Klemes et.al, 2005).

The Aachen (Germany) based company is known as the “Gantt Company.” The company aims to provide greater transparency in production, project management and scheduling of sources. The two largest components of the technology are:

1.    The “Gantt Chart Controls” VARCHARTX GANTT and VARCHARTY GANTT, are developed by the company to meet the needs of the software vendors and developers. With the help of these tools, they can develop software for any particular industry to provide scheduling solutions (Kolanjiappan, 2015).
2.    The Visual Production Scheduler, the products like the Visual Jobs Scheduler, and the Visual Service Scheduler are partners and customers of the Microsoft Dynamics. These products provide a generic solution to the organizations by visualizing their production cycles (Kolanjiappan, 2015).

Simulation versus Algorithm Based Industries

The planning and scheduling software solutions can be divided into two broad categories known as, “algorithm based” and “simulation based” solutions. The algorithm based solutions are based on the generic or custom generated algorithms (Low et.al, 2015). The custom coded systems are more reliable but expensive to maintain and implement. Moreover, for most of the multiple industries, the generic algorithms are not available. Algorithm based solutions are recommended for the industries having long-term supply chain management and planning. The constraints available in such solutions are also quite complex (Low et.al, 2015).

Simulation-based solutions are based on the universal custom built environment. The greatest accuracy can be obtained by using custom settings. These solutions are recommended for the industries having highly efficient supply chains and product complexities. The flexibility of scheduling processes is not available in most of the generic software solutions making them impossible to maintain at some times (Low et.al, 2015).

Overview of Scheduling Challenges

Working of Gantt Systems

One of the advantages of using Gantt systems is the fact that they provide customized scheduling and designing problems. The solution can be implemented at any point of the production procedure, and it will yield the recommended path to take for managers (Ong et.al, 2016). The model formed by the Gantt solution can be enhanced using best practices models utilized by the managers in the industry. It is not recommended to start modeling of the organization using a customize simulation software as it creates a significant amount of data; creating complexities in the interpretation. The Gantt software solutions provide generic solutions for the production facilities (Ong et.al, 2016). After thoroughly understanding the generic one can easily customize them according to the situation.

Gantt as General Production Planning Tool

As it is apparent from the above discussion, the key to improving the efficiency of overall production facility lies in improving the automation process. The creation of individual production activity and its control is the first step of Gantt implementation. These small individual activities can be integrated to form a larger system. Owing to this feature, the managers were able to synchronize their operations with other departments of the organization, and it is regarded as the “strongest proof” of its valuable outcomes (Ong et.al, 2016).

Milestone Serial Number	Expected Deliverables
Milestone 1: Project Preparation Closing	1. Developing Questionnaire for industry about approaches used for lean manufacturing. 2. Brief description of the results obtained by the respondents. 3. Coding using SPSS.
Milestone 2: Analysis and Validation	Revised Simulation Results. Writing of project. Draft submission of the final report.
Milestone 3: Final Engineering Project	Final report. PowerPoint presentation. Final script performed on SPSS.

 
The project plan described above consists of all the activities mentioned in the previous sections. The estimated duration of the project is 96 working days. The weekends are also included in the proposed project plan as it mostly consists of the writing and simulations. Gantt chart is also developed based on the above plan. The number of phases required for this project to complete are:

Phase Number	Project Phase	Estimated Duration (Days)	Start to End date
1.	Project Preparation	25	Week 1-4.
2.	Execution	26	Week 5-7
3.	Validation and Analysis	23	8-12
4.	Delivery of the Project	22	12-14
5.	Total:	96 Days	4 Weeks

 

Figure 4:  Gantt chart (Project Scheduling).

To ensure the accurate scheduling of the project, the Gantt Chart will be used to estimate the time, and according to that chart, a monitoring logbook will be established. This logbook will be developed and shared with the supervisor and some of the respondents to evaluate the progress of the project.

Conclusion

Achieving the lean manufacturing goals in a production facility can result in giving several benefits to the organization. The re-engineering process taking place at manufacturing plant when implemented according to the scheduling done by the Gantt Technologies can lead to:

1.    Few planning nodes and events to look out for the management.
2.    Reduced Manual inventory for the organization as it is assigned automatically by using Gantt technologies.
3.    Reduced procurement costs.
4.    Small handling costs due to few orders.
5.    Reduced material handling.
6.    Cost functions contain the technology is handling fewer variables as most of them.

To, obtain the goal of an efficient managerial control, it is often recommended to use dedicated program managers. This individual should be able to identify the systems and assign the values to the Gant Technologies. Once the organization can automate the entire production and proper operations, the capabilities of the program managers can be used in other problematic parts of the facility. In the proposed project we are going to evaluate the efficiencies of the production facilities when they are using assisting technologies. The goal is to address the eight wastes in the lean manufacturing concepts.

References

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Genua, C., Giuffrida, S. and Rinaudo, S. (2006). “GANTT CHARTS FOR PRODUCTION FLOW” FRAMEWORK. IFAC Proceedings Volumes, 39(3), pp.691-696.

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