The design of a lean automobile dismantling and recycling system

Abstract

The purpose of this project was to design a new, more efficient automobile recycling system for the JMS consortium. JMS is a consortium of l 8 independent automobile recycling facilities processing a collective annual throughout of over 200,000 vehicles. 1 o begin the design process three JMS facilities were studied to establish the system requirements. Based on the requirements a new system was designed using the principles of lean production. Aspects of the system were tested at the same three locations to validate the design. Based on the test results, the lean system design presented herein is expected to increase effective daily throughput 25%, increase the peak throughput rate by 6:%, significantly reduce the handling therefore damage of each vehicle, and reduce the amount of land allocated to non-value adding buffers by 66%. Furthermore, the lean system is balanced and synchronized to the vehicle-arrival process, with increased volume flexibility. Currently, JMS anticipates implementing the design in all new facilities beginning with the Denver project this month. To address the question of what is the optimal throughput rate for JMS facilities, all known profit-influencing variables were parameterized and an analytical model of the profit was established. Using some simplifying assumptions, the profit-maximizing throughput was obtained. From this, three interesting and intuitive results were obtained ...