Design of a new assembly cell with high productivity and good ergonomics - Carried out at Parker Hannifin in Trollhättan to meet their changing demands

Parker Hannifin is an American owned company. The factory in Trollhättan belongs to the Pump and Motor Division (PMD) and manufactures hydraulic pumps and motors. There are different product lines within the factory with separate flows. The C24, the product that is analyzed in this Master Thesis, belongs to the Variable product family and is a big hydraulic motor that saves the braking energy from a vehicle to use later for the acceleration. The task is to analyze the consequences for the material handling when the annual sales of C24 gets radically higher than today. A new design of the assembly cell was needed that would be able to handle high volumes but also be easily scalable. The result of the project is a proposed layout design of the future state assembly and some ideas of how to manage the increased material flow. The layout is based on the current conditions and future demands. It´s designed with new ideas but with a strong link to theory. The solution has been developed with respect to productivity as well as ergonomic aspects. The proposed solution suggests that new technologies such as: pick-to-light and RFID could be implemented as a pilot-project in this new assembly. Some ideas have already been validated since the “C24 assembly developing group” parallel to this project started to build up models of the new assembly and tested the proposed solutions in an assembly testing area. As an effect of this some ideas and solutions from the content of the Master Thesis was already in use in the future work even before this thesis was completed. However, other things such as: capacity of the in-house manufacturing, the implementation of new technology and investigations of what material handling systems to use in different situations still needs to be further investigated