Workshop 5: AI-Powered Mixed Model Line Design: From Spreadsheet to Simple Digital Twin
- Select a room
High-mix, low-volume manufacturing has always demanded careful line design: stable takt, robust routings, and flexible staffing are what keep variety from turning into chaos. But most plants are still making multimillion-dollar automation and staffing decisions from static spreadsheets and slide decks.
This hands-on workshop shows how to turn a conventional Mixed Model line design into a simple digital twin and then layer practical AI tools on top—without a data science team or a multi-year IT project. We’ll start from a realistic high-mix assembly scenario and walk through the familiar steps of calculating takt time, defining product families, mapping routings, and sizing resources in a spreadsheet. From there, we’ll convert that static model into a lightweight simulation that can answer “what if?” questions about mix, volume, staffing, and automation.
The new generation of AI coding assistants and low-code tooling makes this workflow achievable by typical plant engineering and CI teams using mainstream tools, rather than requiring a large IT staff or a multimillion-dollar digital transformation program. Along the way, attendees will see working examples of AI-enabled helpers in action: video analysis of standard work, a PFEP-style data backbone to support Mixed Model material flow decisions, and AI-assisted A3 problem solving to turn insights from the digital twin into concrete countermeasures.
The session is vendor-neutral and focused on methods; the prototypes shown are there to make the ideas concrete. Attendees will leave with a repeatable pattern for using AI and simple digital twins to design smarter, more automation-friendly Mixed Model lines in their own plants, starting from the spreadsheets they already have.
