Assembly operation productivity improvement for garment production industry through the integration of lean and work-study, a case study on Bahir Dar textile share company in garment, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

Abstract

Productivity improvement is a significant issue for the textile and garment industry to survive global competition. Therefore, the nation's efforts towards this improvement are one of the key weapons to attain cost, time, and quality advantages for rivalry. Ethiopian garment industries are not competitive due to low productivity, which is caused by multidimensional productivity factors related to humans, methods, control, processes, and products. Hence, a single tool or simple model cannot boost significant change for productivity improvement and cannot solve both internal and external productivity factors of the garment industry at this time. However, combined techniques or tools of lean and work-study are preferable. Lean manufacturing is a procedure to identify and eliminate non-value-adding activities in a consistent, continuous improvement. Lean techniques provide a good overview of the processes, whereas work-study methods focus on the critical areas of the operation. This research deals with productivity improvement in the assembly operation of the garment industry with a case study using integrated techniques and tools, such as line balancing, work standardization, time and method study, total working method, and process improvement related to kaizen and 5S. These tools help to eliminate non-value-adding activities were reduce lead time, and defects. The study illustrates, using a case study, the most critical factors that hinder the productivity of Ethiopian garment industries and how to solve these factors through integrated techniques or tools. The research is practical and realistic, and the necessary data was collected using primary and secondary data from the Minister of the Ethiopian garment industry and the case garment. The observed results indicated that non-value-adding activities were minimized from 43% to 5%, bottlenecks from 3 to 0, and the transportation distance of the workers was reduced by 650 m per shift. The daily production output of the case garment and main exports of Flat sheet and Quilt cover products increased from 43.3% to 57.7%–75.8% and 100% pcs per shift, respectively. The standard time for each operator can be set using time study, which can save 315 min for the case garment operation, achieving its production targets of 800 pcs per shift. Therefore, using a single tool or model has not significantly improved this garment industry, but it should be used as a combined tool of lean and work-study for attractive productivity improvement.