Milkrun Based In-plant Supply – An Automotive Approach

The material supply of workplaces in a manufacturing system can be realized in many ways. In the last few years, the milkrun-based in-plant supply is widely spread, especially in the field of the automotive industry. Milkrun supply makes it possible to feed manufacturing and assembly workstations keeping on the 9R rule. The lean approach is a framework for reducing costs and enhancing the quality of products and processes in automotive domain. The design and operation of milkrun based in-plant supply includes a wide range of optimization problems, like location, routing, scheduling, assignment or queuing problems. After a careful literature review, the authors describe the typical milkrun solutions of in-plant supply. The description of milkrun morphology makes it possible to define the most important aspects of milkrun supply solutions. Next, typical milkrun based supply processes are presented and their evaluation method is also described to analyze the efficiency of various solutions.