Enhancing Manufacturing Operations Within the Supply Chain for Sustainable Frozen Shrimp Production

Abstract

Although Thailand is one of the world’s leading exporters of frozen shrimp, the production process and management of the production line remain problematic, due to high operation costs, which may make it difficult for Thailand to compete with other export countries. The aim of this research was therefore to improve the production process for frozen shrimp. Value stream mapping (VSM) was utilized to identify the activity processes, from raw material to the customer, and line balancing (LB) was employed to arrange the production line to achieve process improvements. The ECRS (Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify) technique was applied to manage and ameliorate the production process. The result was a suitable production process for frozen shrimp in which the profitability to entrepreneurs can be increased through lean improvement techniques. VSM revealed that the efficiency of the total cycle time could be decreased by approximately 61.72%, and that the lead time could be reduced by about 48.8%. Improvements to the frozen shrimp process through LB could yield an accuracy of up to 90.50%. The ECRS technique helped in arranging new processing to achieve improvements; value-added (VA), non-value-added (NVA), and necessary non-value-added (NNVA) tasks showed that the efficiency of the production process could rise to 46.37%, 25%, and 92.85%, respectively. Entrepreneurs will be able to run their manufacturing processes and achieve high production efficiency in the future using the methodologies and management practices described here.