Development of flexible assembly line with limited space allocation for manufacturing company

Abstract

Space is an important asset for contract manufacturing to compete with other companies. In order to compete that, manufacturing company must have industrial knowledge before developing assembly line and flexible assembly line is one of the factors contributed to the optimization of space. Then, in order to remain competitive and increase the output and optimize the man powers used, Assembly line balancing (ALB) must be identified and solved. Ultimately, the better line balancing will gives better impression on the space. Furthermore, single model assembly lines are not popular. Aim for this study is developing flexible assembly line with limited space allocation for manufacturing company. From here, flexible assembly line is able to save a space for manufacturing company and the significance of having a wellstructured multi product assembly line in terms of resource reduction. At the first step, the first model (model A) demand, operation hours, number of man powers, method time measurement (MTM), equipment selection, process and activities are studied. In the second steps, based on the TAKT time calculation, line for model A is balanced. Model A and model B is studied using same approach. Flexible assembly line is introduced for model A and model B because of the process is almost same. Equipment selection has been introduced by changing conveyor to the pipe and concept to implement U-shaped assembly line to more further to optimize the space. Based on the result of space, man powers and line efficiency is showing that Ushaped assembly line has brought great savings to the company. Ultimately, the results shows that by implementing line balancing using TAKT time calculation, MTM, flexible multi model, manpower on line are reduced to 6 man powers, space reduced from 350sq ft to 238sq ft while line efficiency is increased until 77%.