Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd.

Background

Renewal of manufacturing process management base to strengthen international competitiveness

The design and manufacture of modern aircraft, which consists of extremely complex processes, is supported by IT in a wide variety of areas.
Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Ltd. Aerospace Systems Company (hereinafter referred to as Kawasaki Heavy Industries), one of Japan's leading aircraft manufacturers, traditionally positioned it as an important management resource to win the competition in the global market, where the use of ICT is changing drastically.
In 2009, we were one of the earlier company to introduce SAP ERP not only in the accounting field but also in the manufacturing process in general, and since then, we have continued to work on process integration throughout the organization and have achieved good results.
Mr. Akihito Sakai, Director and Doctor of Engineering (in charge of SCM & IOT, Gifu Factory), said that the background to the decision to introduce SAP S / 4HANA PEO as a new management platform this time was the "flow down of technical requirements", which is an essential issue in the aircraft business..

In aircraft manufacturing, changes in "technical requirements" such as drawings and specifications must be immediately communicated to shop floor and all must be recorded.
Moreover, these management statuses need to be disclosed immediately at the request of customers and certification bodies. Traditionally, the company has done many of these complex tasks manually using paper-based documents.
"We have a production system based on our own idea called KPS (Kawasaki Production System), and we are working on improvement activities at the production shop floor every day.
This activity is a very complicated task of changing the shop floor works and improving productivity while strictly ensuring the "flow down of technical requirements".
Paper and manual based management required a great deal of effort and was reaching its limits. The ongoing renewal of the manufacturing management infrastructure aims to meet the requirements of customers and certification bodies more rigorously and quickly, including the flow down of technical requirements, while at the same time saving labor and further improving KPS.
In addition, aircraft manufacturing management tends to be partial optimization due to depend on workers professional skills and knowledge.
Shifting these workers depended manufacturing to overall optimal management based on data was also an important issue in enhancing international competitiveness. (Mr. Sakai)

Benefits of the solution

The key to success is Continuous system optimization through functional improvement requests to SAP in deep relationship

With the introduction of SAP S / 4HANA PEO, it is a big evolution that all production information in Kawasaki Heavy Industries' aircraft manufacturing can be connected through data in a straightforward manner and the process can be visualized.
This has important implications for reliably responding to the flow down of technical requirements and increasing the trust of customers.
In addition, the most big and detailed result from shop floor is the improvement of work efficiency brought about by the shift to paperless work.
By converting all production information into data, the time and effort required to find the necessary paper documents can be greatly reduced in shop floor.
“If we can use the system with familiar devices such as smartphones and tablets, we should be even more productive.
To be able to recognize these on-site movements for managers in real time, we can expect to strengthen the management organization. "(Mr. Sakai)
For Kawasaki Heavy Industry, the introducing new system is not goal, but only the process.
Especially for SAP S / 4HANA PEO, which has a small result of introducing even globally, continuous system optimization and accumulation of know-how will affect future investment value.
In the current ECC 6.0, the number of add-on programs tended to increase with requests from users. The key to success the project is, how we can improve the functions of SAP S / 4HANA PEO itself by close communication with the development team at the SAP headquarters together for the future.
The key is to get rid of it. "(Mr. Sakai)