Lean 4.0: A Digital Twin approach for automated cycle time collection and Yamazumi analysis

As Lean Manufacturing and Industry 4.0 aim to create flexible and agile production systems, integrating Industry 4.0 technologies enables manufacturers to optimize their production processes, reduce waste, and improve overall efficiency. This paradigm, known as Lean 4.0, helps companies increase their competitiveness in the market by adapting to changing customer demands and production requirements more quickly and efficiently. One well-known tool is the Yamazumi chart for production cycle times analysis and work balance for bottleneck identification. However, the cycle time data collection approach is a problem. Direct observation of the manufacturing process can be time-consuming and prone to errors. On the other hand, automatic cycle time data collection approaches are more accurate than manual data logging. Still, they can be more expensive to implement since it relies on sensorization and IoT implementation. Also, usually, such sensors may obstruct operator movements. This work presents a Digital Twin framework, DINASORE, for automatically measuring cycle times and tracking the production outputs. Yamazumi charts are generated in real-time to give operators and managers valuable insight into the manufacturing process. The concept is proved through a simple production use case using a laboratory demonstrator. Results show that the solution can help better understand the relationships between workstations for production line performance in real-time while also assessing product quality.