Daniel Tunis, a senior Industrial and Systems Engineering student at Oakland University, helped Chrysler make big strides improving stamping plant efficiency during his internship.
According to Tunis, the company had an issue with changing dies in a stamping plant. "Warren Stamping Plant is a large stamping facility, consisting of 12 large presses and 3 progressive presses. Each press undergoes a die change several times a day. During these changes, the dies as well as tooling to transfer parts between presses need to be changed,” Tunis said.
Tunis’
goal is to improve the die change process in order to decrease the time to
complete it, thus saving money. "I
was tasked with working on Line 3, which is an extra-large tandem press. When
I started my project, the line was averaging 78 minutes to complete a die
change."
The first step that Tunis
took was to observe the original die change process and collect data. "With this data, we selected a team from
both management and hourly workers to attack the loss. We developed
countermeasures to eliminate each item that was causing a loss during the
die-set. These countermeasures ranged from doing proper maintenance on
the machine to retrofitting all of the tooling,” Tunis said. The result of this project was to decrease
the time to complete a die change from 78 minutes to current average is 20 minutes, with the final goal being
less than 5 minutes.
Tunis
believes the team's greatest achievement was automating the process of adding
and removing the sunroof trim for the Dodge Ram and Jeep Grand Cherokee roof
dies. “That process initially took 45
minutes and was labor intensive, but they are now able to do it in a matter of
seconds without any human interaction," Tunis said.
After
completing these continuous improvement projects, Tunis presented the team's
results at one of the plant's World Class Manufacturing audits.
“This
is a huge event, as it showcases how on track the plant is to becoming a World
Class Manufacturing plant. I presented my project to the auditors,
Chrysler's General Manager of Stamping as well as several other engineers,
managers and executives from corporate,” Tunis said. According to Tunis, the audience was
surprised that an intern could make such improvements in just four months.
Robert
Van Til, Chair of the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) Department, said
of the internship, "Dan, as well as several of his ISE classmates, have
done an excellent job of showing Chrysler the capabilities of our
students. We appreciate that Chrysler
has, and continues to offer, Oakland ISE students these internship
opportunities."
Tunis
advises students to "go for it" during their internship.