Volvo Cars Skövde will in year 2018 implement a new engine model in Skövde plant, which will lead to a greatly increased variety of the articles in the material facade at the production line when the engine variants increases. However, the current material facade will not be able to cope with the future increase of articles. Therefore, design proposals for the handling of the material by using kit- and sequence picking externally from the production line have been proposed. Hence, handling these operations externally may lead to an efficient material flow, but also enables handling more articles when the engine variants increase.
The main objective of the project was to develop proposals on how workplace design for a kit- and sequence picking station may look like, and how the flow of material should be handled to and from these stations. To implement this, a form of a PDCA-method has been used to structure the work. Relevant literature on the theory and studies in similar areas has been reviewed to gather knowledge in this area. Successful methods used in other studies, i.e. interviews, observations and benchmarking, were also used in this project to collect data.
The results based on the collected data generated, present different layout suggestions of a kit- and sequence picking station, with regard to quality assurance and efficiency of the picking patterns, ergonomics, reliability of delivery and the total area required for these picking stations. It will also manage the flow of materials to and from these stations that should be handled in an efficient way. Prototype sketches of proposed way of transport and aid for the material handling have been developed for the company, which will be a base for continued work before the implementation of the next generation engine in year 2018.