Costs and Learning Factories

Learning factories have been a tool used by companies and universities to be training students and employees in a simulated environment. In Valladolid, we have developed a learning factory jointly between the University of Valladolid and Renault Nissan Consulting for training in lean manufacturing tools (and in the future of industry 4.0) by students of the university and Renault employees and supplier. The flagship product used is a toy car made up of nearly 100 components of different sizes, manufactured in several workstations divided into independent manufacturing cells. In the first learning phase, we produced a few versions that can be increased to more than 1500 if we continue learning up to a fifth phase (only for advanced groups). Although costs (labor costs, material costs, warehouse costs, manufactured products costs, etc.) are one of the key indicators of the performance of a production process in any industry, they are not usually considered directly as one of the key indicators of progress in the different learning stages in a learning factory. This chapter shows how costs represent a tactical decision variable in our Lean School, just as it happens in real life. Costs allow us to represent through a single measure the gains obtained by the application of lean tools at different learning phases that go from traditional production to lean manufacturing. The cost estimation is based on the activity-based costing (ABC) method so that all participants in the training identify where the main sources of costs are located and focus on how to reduce them.