Productivity improvement through line balancing & layout in an apparel industry to build up a reference model

Abstract

RMG industry sustains on customer satisfaction directly or indirectly. Customer satisfaction comes from value added activities which mainly focus on low cost, quality & on time delivery. For confirming the value added activities, an industry must give concern to decrease the waiting time, process bottleneck and above all, increasing the productivity. Line balancing is an effective technique to improve the productivity. This technique is already applied in different industry and proved its effectiveness to improve the productivity. In this work, line balancing is considered in an RMG industry at a sewing line as a sample project. At the begging of the project, existing data is collected through time study and then, analyze the data & find out the opportunity. Using the line balancing technique, production line refers to balance through the balance distribution of work among the workstations. In reference production line, productivity may possible to increase almost 38 %. Existing problems are identified and refer to solve considering the sequence of operation. This research report provides guideline for the garments manufacturer to improve their industrial productivity and capacity by implementing the productivity improvement techniques like line balancing technique.