Production Rate Improvement on Monoblock Pump through Implementation of Lean Tools (Deming Cycle)

Abstract

The global economic competitiveness has demanded the manufacturing companies to sustain and remain profitable in the competitive market by increasing the productivity. Implemen- tation of lean tools has remained as an efficient way to improve productivity. This study focuses on improving the productivity of

• HP Monoblock pump manufactured by Mahendra Pumps, one of the leading pump manufacturing industry in Coimbatore through implementation of lean tools. The workflow used is the Deming Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) approach which provides opportunities for continuous evaluation and improvement. In each phase of this cycle, lean activities  along  with  lean  tools like time study, value stream mapping integrated with Arena Simulation, and performance analysis were carried out.  The  time study is done on the selected production systems to identify the bottleneck stations. Then, the bottleneck stations are taken into elemental level by the Arena  Simulation  which  provides the material and information  flow  of  current  state  of  system in dynamic nature. The kaizen suggestion is derived from the task analysis which differentiates the value adding time and non-value adding time. Arena simulation was used to create the future state map based on the suggestion to ensure the increase in production rate. The improved production rate is evaluated by performance analysis and the results obtained were documented using standardized work combination