Improving Productivity and Standard Time Updating in an Industrial Company – A Case Study

Abstract

Today’s marketplace imposes ever-tightening product pricing and quality requirements, shorter delivery times, and increasingly customized products. With increasing competition in today’s global market, companies are increasingly pressured to improve the performance of their production systems in order to be more competitive and improve market share. In order to try to satisfy these requirements several companies seek for the application of methodologies that may enable them to respond to these challenges, such as the ones based on the Lean Manufacturing philosophy. In this work standard times of four extruders are determined and updated in the context of setup time’s analysis and minimization in a company, in Portugal. First, a diagnosis is made to the tire floor extrusion process in order to evaluate all of its inefficiencies with the greatest impact on the production process, after the standard time of each extruder is analysed and updated through an extended approach which does also consider setup times reduction, along with the production times, for reaching a higher process optimization rate and productivity in the underlying production system.