Ameha Mulugeta (PhD.)Taddese Yohanesse2023-12-142023-12-142023-10http://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/985Today's automotive manufacturing companies face increasing customer demand and highly competitive for quality products at competitive prices in a timely manner. For this reason, manufacturing companies, especially in the automotive industry, need to increase their productivity. The main problems of the case company are non-value-added activities, bottleneck and the unbalanced task of the stations in the assembling line. These issues affect the company’s production rate. The study aimed to improving the production capacity of bus body assembling line in BAEI by reducing the NVA activities, eliminate bottleneck stations and recommend suggestions to produce more products. The first approach that showed the existing production system by identifying non value added activities and the bottleneck area was value stream mapping. Other approach applied for this research was flow control analysis that gave greater insight by comparing takt time with cycle time of the processes. The final approach was involved creating and simulating existing model by using theoretical distributions of the existing processing times to assess the current system performance and create alternative simulation models. According to the simulation result the first scenario increased the product of the company. The report of simulation showed eight (8) buses built per month and a decrease in average cycle time from one hundred forty-two hours to one hundred twenty-three hours and non-value added activity decreased from forty-two hours to twenty-eight hours while adding a station serially for the front and rear compartment assembly and correction station. Second scenario increased the product to thirteen (13) buses per month after taking into account the elimination of the bottleneck processes by adding one parallel station for a bottleneck station, that results additional seven (7) buses produced in a month compared to the existing. The average cycle times and NVA times also reduced from one hundred forty-two (142) hours to one hundred three (103) hours and from forty-two (42) hours to eighteen (18) hours respectively. The findings demonstrated that utilizing VSM and simulation technique, which focuses reduction of wastes to bus assembling line, increase the number of buses built in the assembly line from six buses per month to thirteen buses per month that is 16% increment.en-USvalue stream mapping, simulation, cycle time, takt time, value added and non-value added activities.Thesis