TITLE:
Application of Lean Manufacturing in a Sewing Line for Improving Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
AUTHORS:
Shawkat Imam Shakil, Mahmud Parvez
KEYWORDS:
Lean Manufacturing, Process Flow, Optimum Batch Size, OEE, Lean Implementation
JOURNAL NAME:
American Journal of Industrial and Business Management,
Vol.8 No.9,
September
27,
2018
ABSTRACT: The purpose of this paper
is to implement lean in a sewing line, analyzing the layout, process flow and
batch size, in order to improve Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). To understand the overall performance and scope of
improvement the existing layout and process flow are analyzed exquisitely.
After that, the authors proposed a new layout reorganizing the process flow
that eliminated backflows and reduced transportation time. The authors found
that batch size has significant effect on waiting time and transportation time.
Smaller batch size increases transportation time and decreases waiting time,
and vice versa. For batch size optimization, summation of waiting time and
transportation time for different batch size is calculated and the smallest one
is selected as optimum. Through the application of reorganized process flow in
proposed layout and optimum batch size, reduction in transportation time by
30.95% and increment in OEE by 3.75% have been achieved. Following the
instruction of this paper, any organization can measure OEE and improve it by
optimizing batch size, reorganizing process flows, redesigning layout and
eliminating back flows. In this research the authors only redesigned layout,
reorganized process flows and optimized batch size that lead to an improvement
in OEE but it is still far behind as compared to world class OEE. Lean is
enormous with its numerous tools and philosophies and it says that there is no
ultimate destination on the improvement journey. There are many other tools and
philosophies of lean which can be applied for further improvement.