Productivity Enhancement in a Small Scale Manufacturing Unit through Proposed Line Balancing and Cellular Layout.

Lean manufacturing techniques leads to the elimination of non-value added activities in the industrial ambiance and identifies the current manufacturing procedures, processes to achieve improvement in terms of cost reduction, increase in quality and profit. Lean manufacturing tools are extensively used in industries for recognizing and eliminating the non-value added activities, aiming towards to effective utilization of resources and productivity improvement. Through this research article a study has been made by adopting lean manufacturing techniques to enhance the productivity in gas stove burner manufacturing unit by reduction of lead time. The process flow of existing system is analyzed by using visual study and time study for individual processes. The current layout for the process flow studied and the proposed layout was derived. The proposed layout has been used for successful work flow to meet the future production requirement. To minimize the material movement and reduce work in progress inventory the Kanban storage system was established. Rank position method has been used for line balancing which gives optimum resource allocation for the process based on the Tori Amos Khang Trang time. The proposed layout reduced the material movement from 97 meters to 63 meters and production had also increased by about 20%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]