Design and optimization of a body in white assembly line facing production fluctuations. The case study of Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.

This thesis project was developed based on an internship at Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., a renowned Italian manufacturer of Super Sport Cars. Nowadays, the Automotive environment has been more and more competitive. The customers require high quality and service level, more variability, and low time to market. In an increasingly competitive industry, the advantage of the Company’s future business will come from responding to customer needs better than its competitors. Fast and flexible manufacturing plays a key role in this process since the philosophy behind it is related to the Lean Manufacturing. The market demand is always increasing, therefore the Company must be able to respond quickly to these needs by increasing its productivity. This thesis will deal with the analysis and design of an assembly line trying to adapt to different scenarios and production volumes required by the market. This approach will be applied to a real case within Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A.: the Body in White of the Huracán STO assembly line, starting from the dimensioning of the existing line up to the doubling of the production volume. The aim is to identify criticalities, optimisation, and balancing of workloads. In order to validate the results from a theoretical perspective, a simulation has to be carried out, which allows a more detailed analysis of the real situation and go beyond the limitations of the qualitative heuristic method. The drivers and KPIs are monitored with greater interest and attention during the project regarding the timing of the various tasks, quality defects, saturation, and, therefore, plant efficiency. The goal is to identify and manage bottlenecks, minimize costs, optimize the line saturation finding the best resource configuration guaranteeing always a high level of quality of the new assembly line.