Development of a performance control system in an engineering to order production context

The present thesis was developed in collaboration with the Test Equipment Production unit of a company. This Production Unit manages, as its name indicates, the industrial activities relating to test equipment. The equipment makes it possible to test the other products, and their subsets, throughout their life cycle, that is: during development, production or integration, during qualification, and in the maintenance phase at the customer site. Producing such a kind of equipment requires a specific, complex and heterogeneous process, characterized by unique products, unitary manufacturing cycle, very long and variable lead times, as well as a major and unavoidable upstream design and development phase with inherent uncertainties. Due to its nature of Engineer-to-Order production, an important nervousness and a lack of maturity in the input data is usually associated with the design and development phase, which is influent for the uncertainties brought into the production plans. In recent years, the activities related to the test equipment have developed strongly, with a sudden rise.. As a result of this organizational decision, the requirements in terms of deadlines, quality and costs have never been so challenging. In this context, it appears essential to be able to measure and control the performance of the integration process of test equipment with great precision. This is required due to two main reasons: firstly, to facilitate steering and decision-making and, secondly, to enable the implementation of a continuous improvement process. The internship and, then, the thesis are therefore motivated to improve the production planning and control of the site. To this end, the first activity was aimed to learn about the production system within the site and the way production management was currently working: the MRPII method was the applied planning approach, at the core of capacity planning in the site. After having the problem well in mind, the second activity aimed to study the original MRPII method to create improvements in the extant production method, in particular, the production management method, with the purpose to create a record file that, by following every movement on the production activity, may be useful to ease the searching of delay reasons. The work finally allowed to integrate the MRPII method with a monitoring capability to better control the performance of the integration process of test equipment.

La presente tesi è stata sviluppata in collaborazione con l'unità di produzione di apparecchiature di prova di un'azienda. Questa unità di produzione gestisce, come indica il nome, le attività industriali relative alle apparecchiature di prova. L'apparecchiatura consente di testare gli altri prodotti e i loro sottoinsiemi, durante tutto il loro ciclo di vita, ovvero: durante lo sviluppo, la produzione o l'integrazione, durante la qualificazione e nella fase di manutenzione presso il sito del cliente. La produzione di un tale tipo di attrezzatura richiede un processo specifico, complesso ed eterogeneo, caratterizzato da prodotti unici, ciclo unitario di produzione, tempi di consegna molto lunghi e variabili, nonché una fase di progettazione e sviluppo a monte importante e inevitabile con incertezze intrinseche. A causa della sua natura di produzione da Ingegnere a Ordine, un importante nervosismo e una mancanza di maturità nei dati di input sono solitamente associati alla fase di progettazione e sviluppo, che è influenzata dalle incertezze introdotte nei piani di produzione.