Waste Elimination in an Automotive Feeding Industry

Abstract

The project objective is to reduce the waste in different aspects in an automotive feeding factory. One of the wastes is generated from the sheet cutting process, in which the sheet is cut into specific pattern of one product type, which leads to a huge waste of material. One more waste is observed in the welding station. The incorrect procedure of welding task generates the poor quality waste in the final product. Moreover, there are seven grouped press machines that used for manufacturing the variety of products, with an average 45 minutes for every setup on each machine, which has a huge impact on the machine availability. The project will emphasize how a developed report was used to implement a linear programing approach, in which the waste was reduced from 1.1% to 0.43%. Plus, it will highlight the training program, which underlined the welding basics and the handling of standardization sheets that was developed to improve the worker efficiency from 83% to 87%. Also, the project will highlight the implementation of Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) that lead to reduce the changeover time by 38%. In addition, using the best fitting forecasting technique, the market demand for the coming quarters are forecasted to define different scenarios. Thus, a proposed scheduling optimization model was developed to be implemented to increase the press machines efficiency and reduce the needed working hour by 14%. Finally, the market demand will be forecasted, and the project will discuss the factory incremental improvement S-curve, in which the need of innovation is recommended.