Improving Work Station Efficiency with Plant Simulation

Virtually testing improvements in your plant allows you to test changes with just a few clicks.

Siemens Tecnomatix® Plant Simulation is a great tool for generating reports on product flow, labor usage and other data analytics about your plant. Shahrokh Yousefi, electrical engineer at Patti Engineering, recently created a demo using the Plant Simulation software.

The Demo

Our example ‘plant’ consists of four manual work stations and one set of bins for our end product. One product is built entirely in a single station while the other product is built across three stations. Our model in the video is running a simulation with two workers who bounce between stations as they build different components and parts.

We generated two reports at the end of the video on worker utilization and station efficiency. You can see that our workers are fully utilized at all times, but three out of our four stations are running at less than 50% capacity. Since we have created a digital twin of our ‘plant’, we can simulate different variables in the system to find out what works best for the real-life system.

Possible Improvements

Maybe next time we run the model we will try adding a third person or move the location of the bins. Perhaps the process changed and we could simulate adding an additional auto station. All the testing and re-testing of different scenarios is done to get our plant running at the optimal level – without moving any equipment or hassling our operators with endless changes.