Proposal of a Software Tool for Manual Assembly Outputs Simulation

Abstract

Manual assembly operations are often the bottlenecks of production processes. Usually, in order to find out, what the throughput of these manual assembly operations will be, it is first necessary analysing them in the context of the workstation and the whole processes as well. For these analyses, one of the most useful tools is the use of simulation. Despite existing several complete software for these purposes, they often demand significant time and effort to create good simulations. Sometimes, however, it is just enough to simulate a few key aspects of the assembly process to get key results, which are often the base for immediate and/or further process improvement. In these cases, creating a special analytical tool that allows efficiently obtaining a sufficiently good solution to the given problem becomes a viable and convenient option. This paper presents an assembly simulation and analysis tool designed and created in Microsoft Excel by the authors. The tool is useful for quick analyses of assembly tasks without the need of having to engage in creating complex 3D models and extra analyses. The proposal is implemented into a practical case study, which allows verifying its validity.