When trying to accelerate a product to market, it’s important not to tie things down too early.

The factory takes square hollow section steel and plate steel as raw materials and fabricates different types of painted trusses.Using expected market demand as well as the ongoing truss system designs, a process flow for fabrication was developed with initial layouts for arrangement and quantities of equipment.

Most of this process is to be automated with some manual intervention for transport, quality assurance and painting; processes where automated stations are unnecessary or significantly expensive against provided benefit.. To provide a better understanding of the system, we built a time-based discrete event model to represent the process and provide key outputs for various sets of input parameters.This allows the designers and stakeholders at an initial planning stage to see, digitally, how their assets could perform during production and provide feedback during the project at the earliest opportunities where large changes can be made to maximise value.. For the purposes of this project, operations upstream of raw material addition, and operations downstream of the final truss painting, were excluded from the simulation.The remaining process steps represented the core fabrication steps to transform raw materials into finished trusses, in addition to some of the largest investments in capital and automation and, therefore, the areas of highest interest.. We built the model itself in AnyLogic, primarily with the process modelling and material handling libraries.

We drew a spatial representation of the factory to define the arrangement, quantity and sizing of process stations and travel routes (including conveyors and forklifts) as well as crane zones to facilitate movement of raw materials and assemblies through parts of the line.We created a logic flow to define how all the raw materials and assembled trusses moved through the system, depending on their types and other parameters..

Some aspects of the process were fixed, such as the quantity of welding stations and the routing of specific truss types (e.g.

truss type A and B can be processed in welding station 1).Then move on to the welcome, the ambience, the food, the price, and so on.. And in the Value chain there may be clear ambiguities or conflicts that need to be resolved.

These can be brought to life by creating a value landscape.This is a visualisation of the different stakeholders.

Take Company A that wants to deliver affordable quality housing as part of a long-term secure investment of funds.To do this they need to develop a product, get it built by a Developer, and attract people to live in the accommodation, Dwellers.