PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT USING VALUE STREAM MAPPING ON SEAT ASSEMBLY LINE

Abstract

In this competitive world, manufacturing companies has to look at redefining and redesigning of their production systems to attack the competitiveness demanded by the markets. The purpose of the paper is to know how value stream mapping (VSM) is used as a tool in implementing lean, to make improvements in the possible areas and to make modification from the current state to future state which helps in reducing the waste, eliminate non value added activities and increase productivity. A paper is based on the work that was carried out in an auto ancillary MNC company located in Pune .The aim of lean manufacturing is to reduce non value added activity, time to delivery, produce the quality products with economical and efficient manner with response to customer demand. The organizations which are practicing lean manufacturing have quality & cost advantages compared to the organizations that are still using traditional production approach. The VSM process is simple and straight forward to implement. It always starts at customer demand and works back through documenting all processes and collecting data which is required for manufacturing of a product. It shows the map “Value stream” containing all the data such as work in process, cycle time, lead time, number of equipment’s, operators and information flows. In this particular case even though we find out that the process can meet the existing demand but a slight increase in it would lead to occurrences of bottlenecks and thereby will be a hindrance to the entire production process. Thus productivity is enhanced by knowing the bottlenecks and by eliminating them.