Paper Title
Assembly Line Efficiency Gain at an Automobile Manufacturing Facility
Abstract
In this paper, the productivity of engine assembly lines of an automobile manufacturing facility is improved by
eliminating starvation in the main-line and the block-line. First, the current efficiency of the real system is measured, and the
building blocks of engine assembly lines are carefully incorporated into a SIMUL8 simulation model. The input data are
gathered, and the parameters of target data distributions are estimated and incorporated into the simulation model. The
current states of performance are examined for feeder and main line downtimes, run rates, takt time of the production line, as
well as push and pull factors. The simulation model is verified to be accurate according to line layout of engine assembly
line, and the current efficiency is found out to be 96%. Further analysis focused on validating the current process model and
improving the simulation model. After careful analysis of stage by stage results and the simulation model, it was revealed
that three activities in the model are the bottlenecks due to lack of input. Therefore, buffers were int roduced in the process to
streamline the process, and the resulting SIMUL8 model improved the efficiency to 97.2% which is close to the ideal target
of 97.5%. Further investigation focused on uncertainty analysis, bottleneck analysis, root cause analysis, and verification and
validation.
Keywords - Engine Assembly Line, Main-Line, Block-Line, Bottleneck, Simulation Model, SIMUL8