Productivity improvement of a manufacturing industry by process improvement through bottleneck and root cause analysis

Abstract

In today's increasing competitive world, it is paramount to constantly improve, be it manufacturing or service industry. Over the years, several lean manufacturing techniques have helped industries to increase their competitive edge over their competitors and simultaneously get rid of wasteful practices. Excavator as one of heavy equipment is designed and accomplished with counter weight (CW) at its backside to keep a balance condition during its operation. The purpose of this paper is to implement one of the most powerful lean technique i.e. bottleneck analysis and root cause analysis. The study has been carried out at one of the excavator manufacturing industry situated in Karnataka, INDIA. The main aim is to study the current process of production of counter weight, analyze it to find bottleneck workstations and make an improved process to meet the forecasted increase in demand. Overall cycle time of curing process was reduced by 85.3% and process time for filling Of CW reduced by 83%. The breakeven time for that installation which costs 1.1 lakh will be only 108 days. All these improvements in the assembly process contributed to 25% increase in production of counter weight.