Case study in productivity improvement in footwear industry

Abstract

At present, the country’s footwear industry is at a preliminary position to play a larger role in Bangladesh’s export fortunes in the next decade and what is urgently needed is to robust backward linkage and improves productivity. Emphasizing on improving productivity steps has been taken to investigate and apply line balancing in the footwear industry. It tries to identify the waiting time and bottle neck as well as eliminate it. Thus, it leads to improvement in productivity of manufacturing and service organizations and quality of products leading to a competitive advantage over others. Bangladeshi industries, especially footwear sector is new and very few have attempted to implement this, but a little research work is carried out in regarding its suitability. This research on applicability of line balancing helped the organization to visualize the bottle neck & waiting time generated in the sewing section and future possibilities of eliminating or reducing them. The research was administered with four footwear manufacturers in Bangladesh using personal interviews, secondary data and observations. The outcome of this observation reflected that an industry may gain higher productivity and profitability by proper line balancing and systematic layout. The findings can be extended to similar footwear industry in the future. A general overview over this development is given in this paper.