tailieunhanh - Rationalizing manufacturing work station: a case study

Small and medium size enterprises often encounter problems in managing and operating production system effectively and efficiently, which result in losing their competitive advantages. It is, therefore, essential to suggest applicable methods to solve these problems completely and inexpensively. | TAÏP CHÍ PHAÙT TRIEÅN KH&CN, TAÄP 18, SOÁ K1- 2015 Rationalizing manufacturing work station: a case study Le Ngoc Quynh Lam University of Technology, VNU-HCM ABSTRACT: Small and medium size enterprises often encounter problems in managing and operating production system effectively and efficiently, which result in losing their competitive advantages. It is, therefore, essential to suggest applicable methods to solve these problems completely and inexpensively. Purposely, an application of work design and standardization process to rationalize manufacturing work station would be proposed. A case study at a furniture company is presented as an example. It aims to create a scientific workstation with standardized operations to help worker get more comfortable, and increase productivity, quality and safety. An implementation of proposed method at a workstation of a furniture company brings promising results. A new workstation is redesigned more effectively in terms of comfortableness, safety, and the productivity increasing 15%. Keywords: Rationalizing, furniture manufacturing, work station, work design, standardization process, lean workstations. 1. INTRODUCTION An effective and efficient work station would bring many advantages for any competitive company. Principles of a good work station have been broken into three basic subdivisions: (1) the use of the human body; (2) the arrangement and conditions of the workplace; (3) the design of tools and equipments [1]. They could be achieved if good standardized work and workplace were designed. Standardized work is one of the most powerful lean tool and known as baseline for kaizen or continuous improvement. Actually, principles of motion economy can be understood better than merely being accepted as memorized rules. Standardizing the work adds discipline to the culture, which would bring many benefits such as documentation of the current process for all shifts, reductions in variability, easier training of new .