Track: Undergraduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

In the manufacturing and production industries, the quality and quantity of product depends mostly on the design of the assembly line. There are various problems that are associated with assembly line which can affect the overall productivity of a manufacturing company. All these problems contribute to increasing the production cost of assembly line. The aim of this project is to remodel the production assembly line for cost reduction while not decreasing the productivity by conducting the process flow evaluation by developing an improved model of the assembly line. The weight-distance method is applied to determine the score of the current shop-floor layout of the metal division assembly line. Using the same method, a proposed shop floor layout is developed. Using the precedence diagram, the manufacturing critical path for the current and proposed layout was identified and reviewed using a discrete event simulation software. During the period between January 2016 and Jun 2017, a list of inventory production entry was acquired and reveal to have produce 103508 batches of finish goods. From these production batch, the top 30% accounting for total item produced are item number ending with the integer of 44 and 74. A time study for item no JS105-44 with a batch size of 100 was conducted and found that the total cycle time from the current shop-floor layout to be 7226.18s. Total weight-distance of the current layout was calculate and valued at 10584.822. Ranking of each department base on the total closeness factor were used to justify the development for layout design. Layout design A has a weight-distance score of 7708.842 whereas layout design B has a weight distance score of 8564.902. Layout design A is selected as the proposed layout. Through a discrete event simulation software, the process flow for hood was simulated with the batch size of 100, 150 and 200. A report state was generated for each respective batch size. Batch size 100 have a reduction in idle time of 0.40 % with increase processing time of 1.97%. Batch size 150 have a reduction in idle time of 0.41 % with increase processing time of 1.63%. Batch size 200 have a reduction in idle time of 0.39 % with increase processing time of 1.58%. Future research can be aimed at the machining line balancing and methods of implementing ergonomic standards and automation for repetitive processes.