Case study of line balancing in a consumer electronic product assembly environment

Abstract

In Imlay's competitive global markets, manufacturers try to gam advantage with shorter cycle time, higher quality and lower cost. Manufacturing industry have several features that make them difficult such as random yields, rework, complex productionline and rapidly changing products and technologie&. In most manufacturing companies, the main fucus of manufacturing strategies is generally on minimizing production cosls while improving throughput, quality, machine and labor utilization and delivery time performance. They have to respond quickly to orders and meet shipping dates, as failure 10 do so many result in a significant loss of customer goodwilL The benefits of effective scheduling and shop-floor control include higher resources milization, lower work-in-process (WlP) inventory, shorter cycle time and greater customer satisfaction. This is particularly true of electronics devices manufacturing with its rapidly changing markets and complex manufacturing processes. TIlls thesis/project studies the problems of de~igrnng assembly-line with flexibility in mind, determining minimum cycle time on per urnt production, frnd out the idle time on each work-station and total idle time of the assembly line, maximize labor utilization and suggest the action plans in the substantial improvement of productivity and throughput rate in a local leading electronics appliance manufacturing company, Bangladesh Electrical Industry Ltd.(PHILLTPS), under Transcom Electronics Ltd. One of quality item of this company is ChangHong color telcvision; one of higher quality color telcvision in China. Thc company produccs this China-brand color television by assembly different componerrts and parts. This project work is based on the data and information of the shop-floor and production-Ene of ChangHong color television. The aims and objectives of the study induded the investigation of bottlenecks in the l\1;sembly-line, estimation of labor standard, maximization of resources utilization, inventory in the shop-floor, personnel managemcnt in factory, and formal production plan and yield assumptions.