Modelling Simulation and Performance Analysis for Footwear Manufacturing System

Abstract

In today's dynamic world economy, corporations are often trying to reinforce themselves as much as possible in all facets of industry competitiveness. This demand for an optimized production system which enhances the company's overall productivity. The survival of every business in today's dynamic environment depends primarily on response time, cost of production, market price, and manufacturing stability. Only by managing the complexity of any manufacturing line will they accomplish these things. The assembly of any product or machine is highly complex, affecting the production time of assembly due to the order of sequence. In order to obtain the optimal line in an operation, it should be very necessary during operation to schedule to make clear which part should come in what order and what tasks will be performed together, how many work stations are needed. The number of workstations, whose task is the previous workstation, and what is in sequence will affect the time to complete the task, as well as the usage of resources, i.e. whether manpower or machines. These things motivated continuous research in modeling and performance evaluation of manufacturing systems. In parallel, different simulation software plays a significant role in developing a model of a real system and performing experiments with this model in order to explain the system's actions and test different operating or production system techniques and scenarios. As the majority of consumable and non-consumable goods are made on an assembly line basis, it is necessary to solve the line balancing issue every day. One type of good that is manufactured on the assembly line method is footwear. This paper deals with the modeling, simulation and performance assessment of assembly line balance of Jamaica-Ok footwear manufacturing company. This paper is specifically concerned with the modeling and simulation of the single assembly line within the manufacturing department: Stitching assembly line. In order to do so, Arena modeling software is used to simulate and calculate the performance of the assembly line's current production processes. Finally, the simulation result shows that the waiting time of each station of the stitching line is calculated among the longest waiting and suggested a way to avoid the issue of waiting time via the development mechanism.

Keywords: Footwear industries, assembly line, Production line balancing, Simulation, Arena.

DOI: 10.7176/CEIS/12-1-01

Publication date: January 31^st 2021