Track: Senior Design Project Competition

Abstract

MDC located in Caguas, Puerto Rico, manufacture several medical devices. The facility was designed to support a major medical OEM’s that was requested. The existing production lines do not have the best process standard to comply with their monthly target of 28,000 parts for each part. The current production is to maintain the current inventory and client needs. When there is a need is incurred to work both shifts of 12 hours to comply with the amount that a client needs. Also, there is a limitation of space and equipment. To achieve at least the daily target parts, the processes need an improvement. Based on the company data was observed the following: the coils grinding, and the sandbar is 16,208 parts; coil electropolish 15,530 parts; passivation inserter shaft 1.4mm 19,442 parts and inserter shaft 2.3mm 8,724 parts. Due to not having a specific sequence that ensures production best practices and safety, no baseline for comparison requirement, and no recent time studies available there is a need to identify gaps, differences, and non-value activities in the process. 

As part of the evaluation, were taken the high-volume products and based on the Pareto chart of volumes, was observed the products with the highest volumes are coils with 33.1%, inserter shaft 2.4mm with 26.1%, and inserter shaft 1.3mm with 17.9% with the combination of three is 77.1% of the products which represent 23,990 labor hours yearly. Why was it chosen the one with higher demand? Coils process is the only one that is different from the other parts process which all include the process of passivation. Inserter Shaft 1.4mm and 2.3mm the process is the same, meaning improving one only, was assumed the will impact positively the other 17.9%. After the preliminary evaluation, some objectives were proposed as the following: increase the production by 10% to 20% (2,800 to 5,600 parts) and an improvement in the labor utilization of 5% to 10%. Some of the problems identified in the areas with a significant impact are productivity (capacity) and utilization. Three alternatives were developed for the three areas of work and were chosen as the best alternative for each one using a decision matrix. After selecting the alternatives to be implemented, it is expected that coils electropolishing have an increase in capacity by 8% equal to 26,880 parts yearly: coils grinding and sandbar an increase in capacity of 12% equal to 37,473 parts yearly with scrap reduction from 15% to 3%. In the case of the inserter shaft, 1.4mm and 2.3mm which pass through the process of passivation is expected a capacity increase of 3% for each one that equals 8,892 parts yearly. Lastly, the ROI for grinding/sandbar 11.5%, electropolish 10.7%, passivation 1  0.8% and passivation 2 6.1%