Lee Industries – Discrete Event Simulation Model
Maureen Mittura, Alexandra DiNatale, Kyle Sardinia & Samuel Kresky
Benefits of Simulation Modeling:
• Evaluate impact of long term events in a short
period of time
• Evaluate changes/projects without executing
capital investments
• Test “what-if” scenarios and analyze possible
impacts
Background:
- Founded in 1924, Lee Industries has evolved from a tin can and
heavy duty kitchen equipment manufacturer in to a global leader in
process systems and fluid transfer equipment
- Kettles, Tanks, and Horizontal blenders are the three main product
types that Lee Industries currently produces.
Problem Statement:
- Due to increasing demand of Lee’s
products there is a need for a model to
help identify bottlenecks, analyze
effects of different demand scenarios on
shop floor operations, and identifying
needed process improvements.
- In light of the time constraints of the
project the team focused on the most
popular product, kettles, to model and
serve as a baseline model to expand
upon and make product specific
observations.
- The project’s overall goal was to
develop a discrete event simulation
model that accurately depicted the
production of kettles on Lee Industries
shop floor.
- Lee Industries is a leader in the design and manufacturing of
stainless steel equipment for the food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic,
and chemical industries.
- Lee has operated without any industrial engineering presence for
over 25 years and is using this project as a gateway into using
industrial engineering expertise to improve their facility.
Approach:
- Identified processes and operations for
developing a kettle.
- Collected and manipulated data, such as
processing times and resource capabilities,
to fit the model. Used a Log-normal
distribution to account for variability of
operations.
- Developed, verified and validated model.
Assumptions:
- Mass customization is
difficult to model in
SIMIO, so the group
created a model that
assumed all standard
parts were present.
- Standard times provided by Lee Industries
were used as processing times in the SIMIO
model.
Future Work:
- Lee has a variety of product lines
which are not included in the current
model (tanks, horizontal mixers, fluid
transfer equipment, etc.)
- Most products do not contain all
possible parts; therefore, a
variability of whether or not certain
parts are included should be
designed.
Analysis:
- After running the model, several
bottlenecks were identified, such as: welding,
grinding and assembly stations.
Recommendations:
- Develop demand scenarios to
analyze how different product mixes
would effect shop operations.
- By adding additional resources or exploring
different methods to accomplish certain
processes Lee Industries could see an
increase in overall throughput.
- Include engineering design time
based on customer model.
- Developing a linear flow to minimize waste
movement of parts and materials.
- Evaluate whether another
statistical distribution delivers better
results.
- Standardizing kettle models to reduce
variability as well as engineering design time.