Time Waste Management in Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Plastic Preform Production

Abstract

In Medcoplast Co. factory in Egypt founded in the late 1960s that started by only producing simple plastic droppers, nowadays Medcoplast Co. have twelve identical all electrical hot-runner plastic injection molding machines for production of plastic preforms and packaging products with 25% of market share in Egypt and even market shares in northern African countries such as Algeria. The main production in facility is PET-Plastic Preforms. A high exchange & refurbishment time of molds (718 min) occur leading to a lower capacity of production, direct time & money losses, while Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) is considered a major lean manufacturing tool & one of the most used techniques to tackle mold exchange operation management & time reduction of them. In this project, Implementation of the basic steps of SMED technique separation of activities led exchange to be reduced by 34% (244 min reduction) including recommendations made regarding operators, inspection approach and material handling. In addition, aiming for standardization and visualization of operation, a quarterly update-able Stream Map has been developed presenting Mold exchange activities flow, assigned operator and cycle times, to facilitate operation on both supervision and operators as a present supporting tool and as guide for future operation improvements, estimating to accumulate at least an extra 7% to the reduction. Any reduction of mold exchange cycle time would directly translate into money & products saved ( ≈ 90,000 - 110,000 preforms for each hour ) as a result of exchange time reduction.