Enhancement of Overall Output in a Small Scale Industry through VSM, Line Balancing and Work Standardization

Abstract

In the present scenario, it is necessary to follow lean manufacturing techniques more effectively and efficiently in order to meet the challenges of the global competitive market. Hence it is inevitable to introduce lean techniques which increase the productivity and reduce the lead time that ultimately results in customer satisfaction. Lean manufacturing has widely been executed in large scale industries over the past three decades. Lean means nothing but the creation of more value for customers with fewer resources and is the current trend for management of products and services. Companies are able to respond to changing customer desires with high variety, high quality, and fast throughput times with low cost. Also information management has become much simpler and more accurate. The main aim of this paper is to study the existing system in a small scale automotive component manufacturing industry and use lean tools to reduce lead time without greatly affecting the current working systems in the industry. Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is used to standardize the production and Kanban is also introduced by indicating the part number and part description to all work stations. Ranked position weight method in line balancing is used to reduce the transportation time of products from one station to another. Cycle time and setup time were reduced by about 350 seconds and 1500 seconds by work standardization and hence the productivity also increased. After implementing SOP the overall lead time reduced from 5780 seconds to 3946 seconds.