A Case Study On Production Line Reengineering

In this paper, the author has made a concise description of methods on improving productivity and cut down manufacturing costs for bottom level manufacturing system as well as presented a case study for a reconstruction of a manufacturing line.Reengineering of a bottom level manufacturing system should be incorporated with the principles of Business Process Reengineering, philosophy of Lean Production, techniques of method study, approaches of work measurement(Predetermined Time Standard and Stop-watch observation), and applications of Line Balancing. First of all, in reengineering a bottom level manufacturing, the process not the operation of manufacturing system should be emphasized. Every kinds of muda(such as movement of material, WIP, waiting, ect.)should be eliminated. Every value added operations should be flow one after another. Pull Kanban system should be incorporated in the process to control the level of inventory thus to show up the bottle neck of the formed production line. The principle of ECRS(Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange and Simply) should be used in process and operation improvement. All the operation should be break down to work elements. The time of every work element should be assessed by means of predetermined time standard (PTS). By means of theory of Line Balancing, all the work element can be rearranged and combined to work stations to form a production line with least balancing delay. In this paper, the author has presented a case study based on a Sino-foreign joint company. The theories, principle, method of bottom level manufacturing system reengineering have been discussed. The key technique in application has been summarized.