MTM China, subsidiary of the German MTM-Gesellschaft mbH and partner in the One-MTM network, hosted the MTM China Forum for Industrial Engineering on July 6, 2023. As a subsequent event to the Forum, the MTM practitioner seminar was successfully conducted online on July 7, 2023, with great success and participation. Wei Jiang, Head of Consulting MTM China and organizer of the MTM practitioner seminar, brought in two experts from Germany remotely on the topic of eHPU (engineered Hours Per Unit). Olaf Damitz, product planner at Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, and Dr. Thomas Finsterbusch, head of the MTM Academy, presented the eHPU metric as a new industry standard for design evaluation to industrial engineers, time managers and work planners from numerous companies based in China.
CROSS-INDUSTRY BENCHMARK FOR DESIGN TIME
The key figure eHPU is virtually an extension of the globally valid standard developed by the vehicle dismantling working group in the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) for evaluating “engineered Hours Per Vehicle”. eHPV measures the design-related work content of a vehicle in vehicle assembly. eHPV is a reproducible and comparable key figure and can therefore be used as a benchmark for product design and construction times. As a component of the production time “hours per vehicle” (HPV according to Harbour), the benchmark value eHPV is also a target value for the new product planning of many automotive companies. The eHPV assessment is used to describe and visualize not only the design-related assembly effort but also the design features of the components.
The two MTM experts believe that the metric for assessing design-related assembly effort can be used not only in the automotive industry, but also as a cross-industry metric – hence instead of V for Vehicle U for Unit: eHPU.
Last year, Damitz and Finsterbusch presented the eHPU metric in an online meetup and discussed its potential applications outside the automotive industry with MTM users in Germany. The recording (in German only) can be found here.
For further information, please contact Dr. Thomas Finsterbusch, e-mail: thomas.finsterbusch@mtm.org.