LEAN REMANUFACTURE OF AN AUTOMOBILE CLUTCH Tony Amezquita*and Bert Bras**
Saturn Corporation Systems Realization Laboratory
Spring Hill, Tennessee Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0405
Abstract
In the history of manufacturing there have been three production systems, namely, craft production, mass production, and lean production. In many automotive remanufacturing operations, craft production and mass production systems are used as the basis for remanufacturing processes. The lean production system has proven to be more effective in the manufacture of automotive parts and it has allowed manufacturers who use it to produce in much greater varieties, with higher quality levels, and with lower costs. Hence, if used in remanufacturing, it would greatly enhance it. In this paper, a current remanufacturing process of an automobile clutch is analyzed, and a lean remanufacturing process is developed and compared to the as is process. Our findings indicate that the lean remanufacturing process provides a more robust process with lower costs when compared with the current clutch remanufacturing process that utilize craft and mass production practices.
*Assistant Professor, corresponding author.
**Remanufacturing Engineer.
1 Our Frame of Reference – Remanufacture in the Automotive Industry Remanufacturing is the most economically sustainable form of reuse and recycling of manufactured goods, and it can be defined as the industrial process where worn out products referred to as cores, are brought back to original specifications and condition. In some cases, especially in the remanufacture of OEM automotive parts, remanufactured products exceed original specifications. The reason is that the latest engineering design and specifications, coupled with failure mode countermeasures derived from failure analysis, are used instead of the original specifications. The benefits of remanufacturing are many, but the most salient are:
1) Remanufacturing salvages the material, energy, capital, labor, and emissions that went
into the manufacture and material processing of products.
2) The resulting production costs can often be lower than manufacturing, allowing
remanufacturers to sell their units for 25 to 50% less than manufactured units with equivalent or better quality levels.
These two benefits are the result of the fact that parts are reused and the embedded utility in the parts are maintained. Hence the resulting production costs, which should be considerably less than in manufacturing, allow remanufacturers to pass the savings on to consumers. Remanufacturing in the automotive industry can be divided into two groups; independent remanufacturers and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) remanufacturers. Both of these activities in the domain of automotive products constitute the largest remanufacturing consumer market segment in the United States and Europe.
In 1978, Kutta and Lund documented a survey capturing some of the issues important to remanufacturers (Kutta and Lund, 1978). However, we discovered in surveys and interviews with remanufacturers that many changes have occurred in the industry since then (Hammond, et al., 1996, Hammond, 1996). Major changes have been the restructuring of automotive companies into platforms and the trend towards mass customization of products. Especially the latter has resulted in what remanufacturers have termed “Parts Proliferation”, which refers to the practice of making many variations of the same product - differing only in one or two minor areas. However, these differences (such as electrical connectors) are distinct enough to prevent interchanging these similar products.
The focus in this paper is on independent automotive remanufacturers, because they remanufacture component parts from most of the automobile manufacturers in the world, and for a very large number of model years. This being the case, independent remanufacturers are faced with a parts proliferation problem which cannot be successfully handled with their current production practices, that consist of a mixture of mass production and craft production practices. As described below craft production practices maintain production costs high regardless of volume, and mass production practices are not compatible with large product varieties. Consequently independent parts remanufacturers are loosing market share to aftermarket parts
