Lean methodologies to improve assembly line efficiency: an industrial application

摘要

Similar to automobile industries, the large earth moving equipment (LEME) industries have a dominant assembly line layout. Improving the assembly line efficiency would improve the productivity of the line. This paper focuses on using lean tools such as time and motion study, kaizen events and spaghetti map to reduce waste in a LEME assembly line. For this research, five zones (or work areas) of assembly were studied and using the lean tools the cycle time was reduced to achieve a 15% reduction in takt time. There were four phases to this research effort: data collection, construction of the process flow map, creation of the spaghetti map, and the implementation of kaizen events. The results from this research demonstrate that waste in an assembly can be identified and removed by studying the process and utilising simple yet powerful lean tools.