A Productivity Improvement of an Assembly Line through Line Balancing and Automated Work-Part Feeder

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to improve line productivity using line balancing technique and a reduction of work variation using an automated part feeder. This is due to the fact that the conventional assembly line manually feeds a part on to the production line by a worker. The feeding cycle is not constant and varies from time to time. Thus, the production rate is not constant and varied by the worker feeding speed. In addition, the assembly line itself does not fully balance. The operation time of each station is not well designed; as a result, all of the stations but the bottle-neck one experience an idle time. The balance efficiency is only at 40.33 percent which means that 59.67 percent of the total production time is balanced delay. Once the automated feeding machine which a buffer is designed and implemented. The cycle time can be set at 6 sec. and with the line balance technique the operator can be reduced from 11 to 9 persons. As a result, the productivity is substantially increasing around 138 percent and the new balance efficiency is 85.12 percent.