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Halewood Case

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A stamping press is a machine press used to shape or cut metal by deforming it with a stamping die. The presses in Halewood produce body parts by processing two materials, steel (approximately 80% of the total parts) and aluminum (approximately 20% of the total parts). Figure ? depicts the key processes of the stamping operations at Halewood. Essentially, during the stamping operations, raw materials are transformed into vehicle body parts and to that end, each step in the process adds value to the product. The press shop in Halewood has 10 press lines in total, which are of three different types. Firstly, there are the tandem press lines, like Line 50 and 53, which are generally simple and relatively inexpensive machines that can produce …show more content…

In the first case, the body parts are packed into stillages and are moved to the storage room for a period of time that usually ranges between one day and two weeks as safety stock. This is the most usual case. Secondly, some body parts produced in JLR’s press shop in Halewood are dispatched to the company’s plants in Solihull and Castle Bromwich. The aforementioned plants produce different models from the ones Halewood does. However, they have presses that do not have the necessary capacity to produce the amount of body parts that the plant requires and thus, those parts need to be produced in the Halewood press shop. Finally, the batch of new parts could be sent immediately to Body in White, where the parts are welded together and start to form the actual shape of the car. This happens less frequently, since it is the policy of JLR to have available safety stock of body parts for at least one week ahead. The scheduling of the jobs that are going to be moved forward in the press shop is planned based on rolling monthly forecasts by the company’s analysts. However, there are some instances when the scheduling has to be changed, e.g. due to an unscheduled breakdown, and in that case the part which has the lowest buffer inventory has to be sent immediately to production. This causes costly disruptions in the planning of the stamping operations, and there is an urgent necessity for the

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