Cutting production costs and lead-times

The client

The VBG Group develops, manufactures and markets trailer couplings for heavy vehicles. With more than 300 employees, turnover in 2001 was  552 million SEK.

The challenge

VBG were finding that there were significant variations in their order flow. Traditionally, this was dealt with by re-allocating resources and maintaining high volumes of inventory to cover order peaks.

Two products were singled out: the drawbar and the fifth wheel (the coupling between truck and trailer). It was decided that they contained too many unique parts, which led to high purchase costs and long lead and set-up times in manufacturing and assembly.

The solution

An important step towards creating a successful modular architecture was to design a new range of drawbars and reorganize the production system to accommodate the new modular concept.

Thanks to the success with the drawbar, VBG enlisted Modular Management’s help in starting up a complete, new workshop adapted to the modular structure of the fifth wheel.

The results

The project succeeded in lowering total costs and reducing the number of unique parts and article numbers. Other results included:

• assembly time was cut by 56%
• the drawbar workshop decreased production lead-times from 21 days to just 3 days
• the number of unique parts contained in the fifth wheel was reduced by 42%
• the number of forged and cast parts in the drawbar coupling was reduced by 48%

To find out more about the benefits VBG gained from modularity and how Modular Management helped implement a new product architecture, download the VBG case story (pdf 52 kB)