Date of Defense

12-7-2023

Date of Graduation

12-2023

First Advisor

Bob White

Second Advisor

Azim Houshyar

Third Advisor

Dana Hammond

Abstract

Geislinger Corporation is an Austrian manufacturing company that has one facility in the United States located in Battle Creek, Michigan. This facility is responsible for all of the Americas, with the complete production and service of dampers and couplings of large-scale machinery. As Geislinger’s market share has grown, their facility has become too small to produce enough pieces to keep up with demand. Geislinger has asked this senior design team to create an optimal layout for the facility expansion that will occur in the spring of 2025. The team has done preliminary research to understand the manufacturing processes of dampers and couplings and the team is confident with the research and the knowledge of the plant manager that they can use industrial engineering tools to create a quality and optimal layout for Geislinger’s needs. The team then created spaghetti diagrams to show the process flow throughout the facility and found many back tracking concerns and congestion with the current layout. Also, the team performed interviews with operators and management to help understand hidden pain points within the current layout. Beyond this, the team created current and future state layouts with the data collected from time studies of each process along with the routings of each process and using the software VIP PlanOPT to give the most optimal layout possible. Then then went through many iterations between VIP PlanOPT and plant management to produce a layout that they felt could be achieved and would make the plant better. A complete analysis was performed to determine the amount of distance each part type had to travel, and the team found that there was a 22% reduction in movement between the sub-assemblies in the system. Lastly, the team created a financial analysis of the facility expansion to verify that adding the capacity Geislinger wants will be in the best interest of their Battle Creek facility. The team captured many different assumptions, and performed a variability analysis to determine if the project should still run if the revenue assumption changed based on a normal distribution. It was found that the project would get at least a 10% IRR around 50% of the time and at least a 0% IRR (break-even) 80% of the time. The team recommended the project to Geislinger.

Comments

Co-authored with:

Amanda Kosasih

Tyler Braet

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Restricted

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