Team 12 Senior Capstone Design ProjectAdvisors | Dr. Natarajan Gautam,

Dr. Mark Lawley, José VázquezMembers | Iskander El Amri, Hyun-Gee Jei,

Luis Jiménez, Catalina Rodríguez

Background

System DescriptionPODs are composed of subassemblies that are broughttogether at the end of two lines and are “married” to finalize theproduct. The distribution of this system consists of the flow syncline and is broken down as seen below.

Flow Sync LineMOD: Composed of riser and stack assembly components. 3work stations per type. Rise and stack components are marriedbefore being married to the MUX.MUX: 4 workstations with a single type of assembly parallel tothe MOD line.

Project ScopeThe scope of this project includes delivering Cameron an effectiveand efficient way of tracking the progress of each workstation.They want to be able to design a work board that contains theability to inform management the exact status of a particularworkstation. Our team broke down the scope into the three portionsas shown below:

Leveling the Flow Sync line to match the speed

of assembly

Analyze time studies to determine standard work

time

Create a workboard to track workers’ progress

1 21 3

Cameron is a world leader in providing flowcontrol equipment for the oil and gas industry.They service clients ranging from the upstreamcompanies to downstream ones thus covering awide scope of the energy production industry.With over 24,000 employee and more than 250platforms using Cameron’s equipment worldwide,Cameron has become the leading manufacturersof blowout preventers (BOP). A BOP is a subseapiece of equipment that is use to withstand,control, monitor, and seal oil and gas from deep-sea wells.

In one of their facilities, located in Houston,Texas, Cameron manufactures an essentialcomponent of the BOP called the Point ofDistribution, or POD. These PODs function ascontrol systems that allow the conversion ofelectrical signal to hydraulic signal in order tomechanically shut down the flow of oil or gas fromthe well.

Proposed System

Approach1. Modeling of the current system: With the use of a G/G/C system for modeling production operations, we were ableto establish the fundamental equations describing the system and derive the utilizations of each workstation. This isfundamental when leveling the lines. The results for all utilizations, coefficients of variance, cycle times, work inprogress, inter-arrival times, and service rate are shown below.

2. Finding root causes and locations of waste in the system: Management at Cameron participates in a daily walkaround the manufacturing floor also known as “Gemba Walk”. We joined the management team for several Gembawalks, analyzed past data, and observed the main reasons why the MOD and the MUX line were not leveled.

Tool Hunting

Not Enough Parts in Inventory

Bottleneck in Testing Baydue to Pushing PODs

3. Creating a tracking system: The Gemba track system consists of two aspects. One is the physical workboard that now contains enough information to describe the exact status of the work station while the otherone is the electronic version composed of a phone application and Visual Basic Application code.

Work Board

Gemba Track System

SMOD1

SMOD2

SMOD3

RMOD1

RMOD2

RMOD3

Sub Assemblies

MUX1 MUX2

MUX3

MUX4

Testing Bay

Our proposed system is comprised of amulti environment enabled system. Startingwith the work board, Cameron will be able tokeep their traditional way of updating projectstatus with the use of the new and improvedboard we created. With the addition oftechnology, the system has the capability ofanalyzing all inputs of data from the phoneapplication in order to create an accuratemodel of the current system. With thisinformation, management is now able toknow the exact utilization of eachworkstation serving as a line leveling aid tomake the necessary adjustments for theworkstations to be on schedule.

Mechanical attendants write the workstation’s progress onthe work board. During the gemba walk, the manager entersthe data through the android phone application. The phoneapplication sends an SQL request to the database through araft of PHP commands. When the manager opens the VBAprogram, the VBA code will send requests to the database todownload the data uploaded by the phone app.

Data Flow

User Interfaces

The original work board contained information that did notdeliver the sufficient information to provide Cameron with theresults they wanted. Information was limited to:

• Project information• Materials needed• Allocated hours• Completed hours

Using lean manufacturing and industrial engineeringprinciples, we integrated the following information to allowmanagement to easily be able to tell whether workers’ progressis ahead of schedule, behind schedule, or on schedule:

• Project information• Task time• Task status• Start and finish date• Clocked hours• Man hours• Weight of each task• Missing materials

The main tab enables the user to create projects manually toaccess created projects or delete projects. It holds summaryinformation about each project .

The model tab uses a dynamic model to calculate theutilization of each workstation. This model gets more and moreaccurate when new projects are created.

The missing parts tab, shows a summary table of thefrequently missing parts and gets updated with each new dataentry.

The workstation state is a graphical representation of thestation. For each station there two boxes: the first one indicatesthe missing material, and the second one shows the progressof the work in the station along with station status(behind /ahead schedule).

C"# = 1λ = 0.01perhr.