Assembly Line Modeling and Simulation of Footwear Manufacturing (a Case Study on Ramsey Shoe Factory
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Date
2011-09
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
In today’s competitive global market, companies are mostly striving to strengthen themselves as
much as possible in all competiveness dimensions of business. This demands for optimal
production system which increases the overall productivity of the company. Survival of any
business in today’s competitive market place depends mainly on response time, production cost,
market price and flexibility of manufacturing. These things motivated continuous research in
modeling and performance evaluation of manufacturing systems. In parallel to this, different
simulation software play a great role in designing a model of a real system and conducting
experiments with this model for the purpose of understanding the behavior of the system and
evaluating various strategies and scenarios for the operating or manufacturing system. Since the
majority of consumable and non consumable goods are manufactured on assembly line system;
assembly line balancing problem is getting importance now a day. Footwear is one of the goods
which are manufactured on assembly line system. Hence, this thesis is concerned with the
modeling and simulation of assembly line balancing of footwear manufacturing in Ramsey Shoe
Factory. Within the production department this thesis is mainly concerned with the modeling and
simulation of the two assembly lines: Stitching and Lasting assembly line. To do so, Arena
simulation software is employed to model and measure performance of existing manufacturing
systems of both assembly lines. Based on the simulation model result of the existing system,
different scenarios are proposed to solve observed problems of the existing manufacturing
system. Problems that are identified in simulation model analysis were: Line balance efficiency
for both assembly lines is low, Relatively high level of WIP is observed in some work station of
stitching assembly line, low production output with respect to the installed capacity, and the
output of stitching assembly line is significantly higher than that of the lasting assembly line
which causes WIP of different model shoes to be piled up in between the two assembly lines. To
solve these problems, five possible scenarios are developed. These are: Avoiding unnecessary
Assembly line modeling and simulation of footwear manufacturing 2011
A case study on Ramsey shoe factory, AAiT (By Nahom M.) Page vi
duplication resource from station with low capacity utilization, merging similar operations with
low resource utilization together and assign to one worker, increasing level of resource at
stations with high WIP, changing working method, and combination of all the above alternatives.
Among the five developed scenarios, the last one, ‘Combination of all the above alternatives’
gives better performance of footwear manufacturing for the selected model shoe.
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Mechanical Engineering