Timken improves labor productivity by 27% with FlexSim

Staying competitive in manufacturing often means refusing to accept the status quo. Organizations that get complacent tend to lag behind, while those that instill a culture of improvement move ahead.

Timken is a striking example of this effect. The company is a global technology leader in engineered bearings and industrial motion products. It designs a growing portfolio of next-generation products for diverse industries from food production and transportation to automation and renewable energy. Headquartered in North Canton, Ohio, the company employs more than 19,000 people and operates in 45 countries.

More importantly, however, Timken emphasizes a mindset of continuous improvement and digital transformation.

“We are always looking for ways to drive labor efficiency and provide better value and service levels to our customers,” says Lance Kelly, who was a Timken plant manager before his current role as President of Belts & Chain. “Sometimes that means being creative and thinking outside your current knowledge and skill sets. It’s important to be willing to try new tools and techniques.”

This is the attitude Kelly brought to a Timken plant that was managing a unique set of circumstances. Demand was steadily increasing but a highly competitive local labor market brought challenges and opportunities in maintaining an adequate workforce. In other words, the plant needed to figure out how to meet increasing demand with a smaller, more efficient team.

“We understood the obvious bottlenecks and how we could address them. However, we knew that if we could better identify and understand the intricacies of our processes, we could achieve greater performance gains,” Kelly says. “In addition to process and labor efficiency, space utilization and safety were also important considerations. We wanted to ensure we addressed some of the challenges we had related to material handling and ergonomics.”

To find that solution, Timken brought in Advanced Process Optimization (APO), a consultancy that specializes in process improvement in manufacturing. For this project, APO recommended blending traditional Lean Six Sigma techniques with factory simulation from FlexSim, an Autodesk discrete event simulation solution.

APO used FlexSim to create a detailed model of the current state of the facility fueled by a full year’s worth of production data to establish trust in the technology. The result was so accurate that it gave Timken confidence that a future-state model would be just as useful for identifying potential changes.

One of the most important elements of the FlexSim model was its ability to introduce variability or stochastic (random) data that is more representative of real-world conditions in a complex factory environment with a lot of moving pieces.

“It’s not very often you can explore the full range of variability that can occur in manufacturing processes,” says Kelly. “One of the things I was impressed by in FlexSim was its ability to model that variability, which allows us to visualize the process—as opposed to looking at numbers on a spreadsheet.”

This is one of the key strengths of simulation modeling. Its deep analysis gives manufacturers the ability to model variation over long time horizons to expose system-wide inefficiencies, as well as perform multiple and longer simulation runs that show a time-varying range of effects on constraints, inventory, and other key metrics.

Before all that could happen, APO had to develop the future-state simulation model. This model took full advantage of the realistic simulation capabilities of FlexSim, starting with an AutoCAD drawing of the plant’s footprint and then populating it with 3D objects representing workers and equipment. The simulation model allowed APO to visualize the new workspace and flow of materials as well as compare projected outcomes against the current-state model.

First, APO invited the Timken team to review the future-state model and vet it thoroughly for potential weaknesses, flaws, or errors in the model that would compromise its accuracy. Together, APO and the team of Timken stakeholders fine-tuned the simulation model and then brainstormed potential changes to the layout of equipment and workflow processes.

Specifically, the team was able to adjust model parameters and equipment layouts to rapidly test a wide range of improvement ideas in the model—all without disrupting current factory operations. They were able to test innovative strategies for product replenishment and flow rate as well as validate the effectiveness of these strategies for different staffing levels.

When changing the physical layout of the lines, the team could observe the positive impact each new design had on safety. For example, they could visualize improvements to forklift traffic resulting from a lower material transportation requirement.

“We looked at everything,” Kelly says. “We reconfigured our work cells to maximize labor efficiency. We sized our inventory queues to reduce congestion and optimize flow. We also improved our material handling traffic and the ergonomics at the workstation. How do you bring materials to the line? Are they presented in front of the handler or behind? Are they arriving up high or down low? Can we reduce the need for compound movements such as lifting and twisting? We were able to evaluate all those elements during the simulation exercise.”

The FlexSim model enabled the team to delve into the specifics of how materials were moved throughout the factory—whether by forklift, pallet, cart or manually—to find inefficiencies. Other aspects that came under intense scrutiny were how far individuals had to move to get materials and tools, how long teams spent waiting when production and supply were out of balance, and the impact of overproduction of miscellaneous components.

The end result was a new arrangement of equipment and processes that eliminated bottlenecks, enabled better single-piece flow, and minimized the number of touches for each part in a complex assembly. With all of this work in place, Timken stakeholders put the new model into practice.

When the future-state model was implemented at the Timken factory, the results were aligned with the expectations provided by the simulation—and the gains were substantial.

Labor productivity increased 27% plant-wide in the ensuing months, enabling the factory to increase throughput with a more efficient team. This was driven by throughput improvements throughout a wide variety of work cells, many of which leveraged single-piece flow.

Importantly, the factory also moved into the top quartile of all Timken plants in terms of operator safety as a result of the rework, supplemented by increased training and education.

For Kelly, these results speak to the importance of using a partner to leverage new technology and industry expertise to make changes that improve operational efficiencies and provide significant return on their investment.

“We look for trusted partners to introduce new tools like simulation,” he says. “We can start small and recognize opportunities quickly if we bring in outside expertise. We’ve seen how effective that can be in terms of improved flow times, higher labor productivity, and safety.”

While Kelly was experiencing FlexSim for the first time during this improvement effort, he came away with an appreciation for what the application can accomplish.

“FlexSim is a valuable tool for organizations that have a desire to deeply examine their processes and drive detailed-level change to optimize performance,” he says. “The ability to experiment and work through iterative designs before putting anything into practice significantly improves the speed of execution and effectiveness of outcomes.”