Improvement of Bottlenecks in Printed Brown Sugar Production Using Line Balancing and Simulation

UD XYZ is a small and medium enterprise (SME) that produces printed brown sugar. In fulfilling customer demands, this SME produces sugar using a make-to-order system. Based on initial observations, indications of bottlenecks were found in the production process. The indications of bottleneck were found in the cooking process as this process is repeated and takes a long time. The prolonged cooking process results in the subsequent process stopping because there are no products to process. In addition, signs of bottleneck also occurred in the printing process, which takes a long time. After identification, the bottleneck occurred at workstation 4 where the cycle time at workstation 4 exceeded the production takt time. The bottleneck caused the company to experience delays in meeting production targets. To improve the bottleneck problem, workstation balancing was done using the rank positional weight method. The RPW method is a heuristic method that has advantages in terms of performance and is easy to apply to real problems. The results of the improvement were then simulated using Extend software. Line balancing with the RPW method resulted in 2 proposed workstation allocations. The first proposal divides the workstations into 5 workstations with idle time calculation results of 157.3 minutes and line efficiency of 65%. The second proposal divides the workstations into 5 workstations with idle time calculation results of 57.31 minutes and line efficiency of 84%. Based on the simulation results, no bottleneck was found in both proposals, with the first proposal producing an average output of 3.7 batches while the second proposal producing an average output of 4.1 batches. The recommended improvement proposal is to allocate workstations according to the second proposal.