South American automotive market pushes tier 1 supplier companies, as Visteon Corporation - Guarulhos, Brazil, to work in an environment of high complexity mix of products together with low volume operations.
As a ring of the above supply chain, the Injection Area is a key internal supplier for the Plant, providing skins (cockpit plastic covers), consoles and other interior and exterior plastic parts to the manufacturing assembly cells.
For a long time Kanban system has been used inside the Injection Area to minimize inventory through a pull system and to gain production flexibility.
This paper explores the link between the Kanban system and the Economic Batch Size (EBS) calculation. The EBS is the production administration approach of optimizing the replenishment costs (mold changeover costs) and inventory holding costs (injection buffer).
This paper will discuss the benefits of the proposed methodology above, based on a case inside the mentioned Injection Area.