Production Improvement of Rail Joint by Industrial Engineering Techniques: Case Study of Rail Joint Production

Abstract

The aim of this research is to improve the rail joint production performance together with appropriate personnel selection process for after-improvement work. The investigation and improvement are done in two levels: process level and activity level. At process level, improvement is done at the bottleneck process using why-why analysis approach along with Eliminate-Combine-Rearrange-Simplify (ECRS) principle. Next, production activity is studied through multiple-activities chart to determine the maximum number of machines which workers can handle. In order to establish staff selection criteria, proper capability for each task is determined by applying Analytical Hierarchy Process to obtain weights for each criterion. The results are reduction of operations processes from 9 stages to 8 stages and personnel reduction from 5 workers to 2 workers. Those two staffs are chosen based on weights for essential tasks, which are 0.340 for machine setting adjustment, 0.367 for product quality test, 0.178 for communication, and 0.115 for read ability to the drawings. Besides that, such improvement can reduce the average percentage of the idle time from 63.56 to 34.65 or a decrease 16.54 percentage but reduce the percentage of machine work rate from 76.16 to 63.56 or a decrease 16.54 percentage.