PROBLEM DEFINITION:

Advances in technology, the greater accessibility of this technology has led to the growth of
competitors in manufacturing industry. This has led to increasing demand for products to be
delivered with shorter and shorter lead times.
This has increased the complexity of production as the time that the product spends in the
industry will be less. Thus the workers and machines have less time to process the product while
it is within the company. The pressure to shorten production times is great and shortening
processing time is very important. Therefore delays in the process due to shortage of parts,
variation in the batch size and the bottlenecks in the production process is not tolerable.
A value stream map of the current process is made and a number of issues are noted down.
In Maini Precision Private Limited one of the main issues is the creation of bottlenecks in the
production of both A-21 and A-33 at station 5 of the assembly line that consists of 12 stations.
While the other processes do not require that much time to process the part, this particular station
does. Another issue with this station is that it can only process 2 parts at a time, while the other
stations can process more. This causes a buildup of parts and reduces the amount of products
being produced per shift and increases the cycle time for the production of these products.
Another important issue, that only pertains to the production of product A-21, is the variation in
batch size of station 2,3, and 4.In these stations the worker does most of the processing work and
hence he varies the batch size. The batch size varies as either 5, 10 or 15. This has an effect on
the cycle time. The cycle time and even the bottleneck creation vary with the batch size. This
increases the time taken to assemble the product. In the case of the production of A-33 the batch
size taken by the worker is 12.
The shortage of a component called the control sleeve in the production of both A-21 and A-33
is also an important issue. This shortage significantly reduces the production time available for
meeting an order, and also can lead to the company making the workers work an extra shift so as
to meet the order deadline.
This project focuses on considering methods to solve these problems. The system is complex
and deals with variability due to the variability in the work done by the labour.
Reduction of bottlenecks: A bottleneck is created at station 5. The main reason for this
is that the number of parts being assembled by this machine is only two while it is more
i.e. 4 ,5,8 , 10, 12, and 15 for the other stations. This will lead to the buildup of the parts.
Another issue is that the time taken to process each part is more for this station as
opposed to other stations. This project deals with the design of another machine that has
the ability to produce four parts at a time as opposed to the two that it currently processes.

 Prevention of shortage of parts: The inventory that the company currently has is not
enough to satisfy the demand, and hence there is a shortage of parts many times a month.
This shortage causes an increase in the time taken to process the various parts. This paper
deals with implementing a Kanban system that determines the number of parts needed as
inventory to manage production when the lead time is 30 days of a particular part.
Reduction in the variation of the cycle time due to variation in batch size: The
variation in the batch size causes a variation in the cycle time and also in the creation of
bottlenecks. To demonstrate this we use simulation. Regression analysis is done to
calculate the ideal batch size, so that the variation in cycle time can be reduced.