Improvement of overall equipment efficiency (OEE) of ring frame section of a spinning mill a case study

Abstract

Globally Bangladesh is the second-largest clothing exporter after China. 82.01% of the total export earnings is coming from textiles and clothing industries. Yarn manufacturing is one of the important subsectors of backward linkage of clothing industries. Ring frame is the last stage of the spinning factory that produces yarns as the final product. It is the critical section since a rope-like fibre strands become a fine yarn through a high amount of attenuation. Spinning mills are facing challenges of improving productivity to survive in the competitive market. The Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) methodology is a proven approach in increasing the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of equipment. It quantifies how well a manufacturing unit performs relative to its designed capacity, during the periods when it is scheduled to run. The present study focuses on improving OEE of the ring frame section in a spinning industry. OEE was measured based on major six stoppage losses. Kaizen, one of the pillars of TPM was applied to identify the areas of improvement in equipment to enhance its overall performance of equipment. Pareto analysis and why why because logical analysis (WWBLA), a method of root cause analysis were used to eliminate the losses. Fishbone diagram was constructed to illustrate the causes of stoppage losses with their effect. In this work, the stoppage time was reduced by 21.75 minutes per shift and OEE of the equipment was increased from 75.09% to 86.20%. Thus we achieved increased availability of equipment, reduced defective products and increased productivity of the ring frame section.