OPTIMIZATION OF THE FACILITIES UTILIZATION AND IMPROVEMENT IN CERTAIN PARAMETERS OF MANUFACTURING SYSTEM USING SIMULATION

Proper utilization of manufacturing resources is of crucial importance to any manufacturing industry in today's global arena of competition. Simulation is extremely valuable tool for analyzing complex manufacturing systems. This paper presents a simulation study carried out at a flywheel manufacturing industry. This manufacturing industry required analysis of its manufacturing process in an attempt to increase its throughput and overall productivity. The main objective of this work was to simulate the existing flywheel manufacturing system and to find whether the current layout gives maximum throughput if not to find out the maximum throughput of the facility and to find the current bottlenecks to the throughput. The work provides information about performance of manufacturing system after optimization of certain parameters. A simulation model of existing flywheel manufacturing system was developed using manufacturing simulation tool. The simulation output helped to answer above mentioned questions. A set of feasible modifications to the existing manufacturing process was prepared. These modifications were included in the simulation model and output of the modified model was analyzed. The results show significant amount of improvement in the parameters like throughput and the work in process (WIP).