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This paper discusses the challenging aspects of dock design to support a just-in-time material delivery system in an automotive body shop. The manufacturing processes and the material delivery system in the body shop were designed with lean manufacturing principle. As a result, internal storage areas were eliminated, non-value added man-power was reduced as much as possible, line side inventory was kept to a minimum, and operating cost of the material delivery system was minimized through the design of a hybrid system consisting of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV) and Fork Trucks. The critical parameters of the system were evaluated and established through detailed discrete event simulation.

A simulation study was undertaken to help design a material delivery system to support lean manufacturing in an automotive body shop. Since this was a greenfield facility, simulation analysis was employed in the very early design phase of the system to determine and quantify the limiting parameters of the proposed lean material delivery system. The simulation analysis evolved with the changes in the design parameters and assumptions of the facility. The updated information from the simulation model helped the designers to evaluate alternate concepts and understand some parameters better such as, traffic congestion, manpower, and storage area requirement.