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Vol 31 - No 07 - November/December 2005 Branch news : North West - Visit to Airbus On Wednesday 29th June, some 25 members and non-members visited Airbus’s wing manufacturing facility at Broughton near Chester. The site has a rich history and today, employing approximately 6000 people, it is responsible for the design, manufacture and supply of all Airbus wing sets from the singleaisle variants to the A340 and new A380 long-range aircraft. Despite dashing the hopes of at least one of the attendees with the exclusion of the A380 facility from the visit schedule, our principal hosts, Unipart Logistics, provided a well-structured and informative event. Unipart was appointed as the Lean Logistics Service Provider (LLSP) for the Broughton operation in October 2002 taking responsibility for a wide range of supply chain activities including goods receiving, warehousing, kitting operations and lineside delivery. Working as a seamless part of the Broughton operation, Unipart manage approximately 14,000 Airbus parts from 230 suppliers with 164 staff and cite significant operational savings in terms of lead-time, man-hours and inventory from their efforts. The day began with a welcome from Mark Hughes, Supply Chain Manager from Airbus followed by an overview of Unipart Logistics by Gareth Jenkins, a Divisional Sales Director for the company. The ‘Unipart Way’ to managing Broughton’s inbound supply chain was then competently and honestly described for us by Unipart’s Bob Nichols. The ‘Unipart Way’ adopts a lean approach to operations and supply chain management and the usual lean fingerprints of visual management, standard operations and Kanbans could be detected throughout the visit. The tour itself began with a visit to the single-aisle flowline. Here, wings for single-aisle aircraft are assembled by progressing through 14 workstations on a paced, mechanised line moving to a takt time of about 13 hours. The herringbone pattern of the line facilitates efficient lineside delivery and an electronic display board suspended above the line provides a takt time countdown. Even excluding A380, production and production equipment are on a grand scale at Broughton and after a brief sojourn to take in a virtual skyscraper of an assembly jig, we visited the impressive low-voltage electro riveting (LVER) facility. The LVER uses huge quantities of cassette-fed rivets to automatically attach stringers to wing panels. We then proceeded to the Unipart-managed areas of the plant where Ian Barrington summarised the goods receiving area before we were taken to a Unipart ‘communication cell’ - a striking construction of visual display boards used to communicate tasks and performance and help resolve problems. The tour concluded with an explanation of the process of replacing ‘shop stock’ at lineside using Kanbans. The visit was educational and provided an insight into a novel partnership and a facility full of manufacturing superlatives. Our enthusiasm and appreciation was shown by a salvo of questions answered honestly and professionally by our excellent Unipart hosts. Andy Lyons, MIOM University of Liverpool Related Topics:
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