Productivity Improvement through Line Balancing by Using Simulation Modeling

Abstract

The typical problems facing garment manufacturers are long production lead time, bottlenecking, and low productivity. The most critical phase of garment manufacturing is the sewing phase, as it generally involves a number of operations or for the simple reason that it’s labor intensive. In assembly line balancing, allocation of jobs to machines is based on the objective of minimizing the workflow among the operators, reducing the throughput time as well as the work in progress and thus increasing the productivity. Sharing a job of work between several people is called division of labor. Division of labor should be balanced equally by ensuring the time spent at each station approximately the same. Each individual step in the assembly of product has to be analyzed carefully, and allocated to stations in a balanced way over the available workstations. Each operator then carries out operations properly and the work flow is synchronized. In a detailed work flow, synchronized line includes short distances between stations, low volume of work in process, precise of planning of production times, and predictable production quantity. This study deals with modeling of assembly line balancing by combining both manual line balancing techniques with computer simulation to find the optimal solution in the sewing line of Almeda textile plc so as to improve productivity. In this research arena software, is employed to model and measure the performance of the existing and proposed sewing line of the federal police trousers sewing line model. For each operation, the researchers have taken 15 sampling observations using stopwatch and recorded the result. All the collected data are statistically analyzed with arena input analyzer for statistical significance and determination of expressions to be used to the simulation modeling; SAM is also calculated for these operations to be used to the manual line balancing. An existing systems simulation model is developed and run for 160 replications by the researchers to measure the current performance of the system in terms of resource utilization, WIP, and waiting time. The existing systems average utilization is 0.53 with a line efficiency of 42%. This study has developed a new Sewing assembly line model which has increased the system utilization to 0.69 at a line efficiency of 58.42% without incurring additional cost.