A simulation approach for medical manufacturing process improvement

Abstract

ABC Medical Manufacturing is a medical product development, assembly, and packaging company that has a paper-based method to track jobs through their assembly process. The paperwork often has errors, which can delay manufacturing steps and shipment, and cause the company to lose time and money. The project team conducted an in-depth analysis of the company's production process to look for areas of improvement. Through statistical analyses of data provided by the company, the team established error categorization, location, and probability of occurrence. To address this situation, the project team diagrammed the company's manufacturing floor and created a list of issues within each step of the manufacturing process as well as potential solutions to these problems. The team created a simulation of the manufacturing process and used this tool to analyze potential process changes to decrease the number of employee hours wasted in order to fix discrepancies. The simulation was created using probabilities based on assumptions that the management team and project team worked through together. The simulation helped visually represent what jobs create the most errors, how many errors occur per month, and how much money the company loses on time spent correcting the errors. Implementing a total quality management (TQM) system would conservatively reduce error counts by 71.3%. Implementing a start quantity to ABC's electronic system would conservatively reduce mean hours wasted from 22.60 to 21.73 hours per month and mean salary lost from $519.82 to $499.80 per month. Using insights from the simulation, the project team then coordinated with management to decide whether error counts or hours wasted and salary lost were more important to address. Currently, ABC is considering implementing a TQM system in order to decrease the number of errors each month.