Enhancement of Production Rate and Flexibility in an Assembly Line by Execution of Various Lean Techniques - A Case Study

This research work mainly focuses on the flexibility and productivity improvement through the execution of different lean techniques in the valve assembly of medium scale manufacturing unit. The different types of wastes percentage are determined to find out the waste which mainly affects the productivity. The major wastes of motion waste by about 30% and unwanted distance of 250 square foot were reduced by implementation of kaizen in the valve assembly area. Value stream mapping was used to identify the bottleneck process and by eliminating the bottleneck process results in the reduction of excess motion and non-value added activity by 45%. Work-in-process aging and work-in-process inventory cost was calculated and the production level was estimated by using 95th Percentile calculation. The total lead time was reduced about 54minutes with reduction of transportation time 2.7minutes after the implementation of lean techniques and the productivity of the valve assembly was also increased to about 6% after reducing the non-value added activities.