Setup Time Reduction for Toothpaste Tube Filling Machine: A Case Study of a Contract Toothpaste Manufacturing Company

Abstract

This research aimed to find ways to reduce the idle time and improve the toothpaste tube filling machine setup procedure. The toothpaste manufacturing industry has many kinds of products nowadays, so the production process would need to frequently change its production plan, thus causing the number of machine setup times to increase. As such, the toothpaste tube filling machine would be unable to run simultaneously. According to the study, the average machine setup time on the filling machine was 157.1 minutes per time. This was more than the planned machine setup time of about 67.1 minutes, or 74.55 percent. The researchers presented the single-minute exchange of die and the eliminate, combine, reduce, and simplify approaches to reduce the average time of the machine setting by about 124.6 minutes per time, or 20.69 percent. The evaluation results of the process performance before and after the improvement by measuring the overall equipment efficiency from 41.66 percent to 58.61 percent increased by 16.95 percent.