Abstract

Throughput plays a significant role for most manufacturing companies in order to examine the efficiency. There is an essential need to evaluate the effect of different factors which are increasing productivity, profitability and reducing the cost with high level of quality. On the other hand, especially automotive companies are striving to sustain their competitiveness by improving overall manufacturing systems efficiency. This can be attained by process development and figuring out ways to deal with various problems which have affected the performance of manufacturing systems. Design of experiments (DOE) is one of the most problem-solving tools that can be used for various investigations such as finding the significant factors in a process, the effect of each factor on the outcome, the variance in the process, screening the parameters, and process development. In this paper DOE and steepest decent method have been applied to develop optimization and system improvement model by finding optimal operation setup. Results DOE was conducted to determine which factors have the most sever effect on manufacturing system productivity. Results showed that two factors B (cooling time) and A (incoming part temperature) have the most significant impact on the system. Based on the final model, to maximize the productivity, the factors should be placed on the optimal set up of all-natural variables, especially cooling time, which is 57 sec instead of 55 sec. Also results showed the system became more robust due to eliminating downtime and bottleneck in cooling process. That led to increase the throughput and enhance the entire efficiency of the system