Improvement of Material Flow in the Production and Supply Chain of ...

calculation, 420 pallets can be successfully transported. In a similar way, 272 pallets of
ADBs can be transported during a weekend day.
In Chapter three, the working days are calculated as 230 days per year, which is only
the sum of 46 weeks’ weekdays. Since the warehouse is working during the weekend,
the same weeks are count in to calculation. Therefore, the warehouse works 322 days
per year, which includes 230 workdays and 92 weekend days. Altogether, the capacity
of the inventory can reach 114,264 pallets per year.
Ignoring the variety of products, one pallet is able to carry 10 ADBs in average. Thus,
the powered pallets jacks are able to transfer 1,142,640 ADBs in a year. This value is
far exceeding the production volume at the present and also much bigger than the
forecasted value in 2008, which is 200, 000 items. Table 6.1 listed out the step-by-step
result of the calculations above.
Table 6.1 Capacity of Warehouse for the Finished ADBs
Work Pallets/day (24 No.of Pallets/year ADBs/year (10
hours pallets/hour) days/year ADBs/pallets)
Weekdays 17.5 420 230 96600 966000
Weeend 8 192 92 17664 176640
Total 4761 hours/ year 114264 1142640
From the result, the increasing volume of production in the recent years will not affect
the warehousing for its big capacity. However, the idle time for powered pallets jacks is
two long, which gives an inspiration in reconsidering the demand of the warehouse to
achieve a more economic way of operation.
6.2.2 Distribution of the market
Currently, the market of the Haldex ADB is mainly distributed in Europe and Asia. In
order to estimate the product distribution, take the customer’s location in a period of
time (from November 13, 2007 to January 31, 2008) into analysis. Market distribution
is shown in Figure 6.2 followed. The order list is shown in appendix A, table 3.
So far ADB products are only produced in Landskrona, Sweden, which means all the
products are shipping from Sweden. Although the distribution above is not precisely
the entire market distribution of all the time, the market is mainly in Europe. This
distribution is close to the location of the manufacturer, which won’t transportation
problem theoretically. However, the market of the Haldex ADB is expanding and will
spread to the other side of the world in the coming future.
The current market leader of Air Disc Brakes is Knorr-Bremse, who occupies 80% of
the market in Europe. Up to the beginning of 2007, Knorr-Bremse already has 12
million ADBs on Europe roads and its subsidiary Bendix Spicer Foundation Brake has
110, 000 ADB on North American highways. (Bendix ® Air Disc Brake -- Fact Sheet,
54