Designing a New Battery Gigafactory

Context

Need to Optimize the Capital Expenditure Related to the Design of a Gigafactory

Our client is a newly founded company with shares held by Stellantis, Total, and Mercedes. The engineering is in charge of the design of a new Gigafactory in Billy – Berclau (France). Such a factory is expected to cost roughly €1 bn, which means that overinvestment in the average common in the industry (10%) would lead to tens of millions of euros in wasted assets. Hence the need to optimize the design of the factory. The client reached out to Dillygence, first to conduct a functional analysis of the factory and then to validate the complete structure of the factory (e.g., inventories, control policy, lead time, production flow)

Our Solutions

Our Expertise in Manufacturing System Engineering in Display

We conducted two basic activities to improve the flows of the battery Gigafactory:

• Functional General Analysis of the Gigafactory: We used our expertise in engineering to conduct a functional analysis of the factory and then validate the complete design of the factory (e.g., inventories, control policy, lead time, production flow). This approach was rolled out to identify all functionalities and tools the factory would need to be equipped with to support the production teams in delivering their objectives (e.g., volume, SKUs, quality)

• Validation and optimization of the simulation model: the simulation model was checked for consistency; its code was lightened for responsiveness. As a result, its runtime was divided by 15. Thanks to this simulation code optimization, the team was able to optimize the factory's whole model and define the system's optimal parameters.

Benefits

Factory Performance Drastically Improved, and the Overall Project De-risked

The benefits were twofold:

• The improvement of the factory design: Our client and our experts proposed a drastic reduction of inventory, lead time reduction, and optimization of the production flow. Several other parameters of the factory were optimized, leading to cost reduction. Overall, we exceeded the targets set by the clients.

• De-risking of the overall project: thanks to the functional analysis, the team identified a list of critical activities and tools that were missing in the manufacturing system engineering process, thereby posing real risks to the overall project implementation.