Productivity improvement through reengineering and simulation: A case study in a footwear-industry

Abstract

Process reengineering is a very useful tool, specifically in industrial engineering where technological advances, information systems, customer requirements, and more have led to the need for radical change in some or all areas of an organization. The objective of this work is to show the usefulness of applying reengineering in the case of the footwear industry to make a proposal to change the problem area and the production decoration line as well as compare it with the current process using models of simulation performed in the Arena software. The proposal consisted of merging two production lines and comparing the current design with the proposal as well as comparing different parameters such as the use of resources and the production rate. The results indicated that the production rate increases by approximately 29% with the new design, using the same resources. In addition, using the OptQuest tool of the Arena™ software, it was found that with the new process, the production rate could be increased by up to 41% compared to the current process.