material provision

Lean material supply and provision concepts are crucial to an efficient production system. In the automobile production are common supply concepts: in-sequence material provision (JIS), vehicle specific sets and non-mixed provision. For the provision of sets containing different part clusters efficient picking processes are necessary. Picking is usually carried out in supermarkets close to the assembly line, which are replenished by warehouses. A scientific project of MAN Truck & Bus AG and the Technische Universität München aims at streamlining these processes and proposes to merge warehousing and picking stages. Prerequisite of a broad implementation of those one-stage material provision concepts is a change in the material supply and disposition strategy.

In production logistics of the machine and tool manufacturig industry RFID-systems are implemented more and more. Enterprises expect an improvement of efficiency in tracing containers and material provision. Implementation of RFID often fails because the processes should be adopted as they are and limits of the technology are not known sufficiently. This article shows the limits of RFID in tracing containers in production and introduces an approach of implementing RFID-supported processes.