LEAN MANUFACTURING AND ITS APPLICATION IN ASSEMBLY LINE

Abstract

Lean Manufacturing (LM) is widely recognized by industries as a solution to eliminate waste and that too without any additional requirement of resources . Automotive Industry has every now and then employed Lean Principles to get rid of irrelevant activities. Assembly Line balancing is also a crucial parameter to establish an optimum cycle time, so that better use of available resources in the form of Men, Machine, Material, Money can be done. LM and line balancing go hand in hand and various lean manufacturing tools like Cellular Manufacturing, Just In Time, Total Production Maintenance, kaizen etc can play a vital role in attaining a near perfectly balanced assembly line. LM techniques like Kaizen rightly understands that in today’s era, market is customer driven that is why, the obsolete push type system is widely replaced with pull type system. When we talk about line balancing our aim is to group the different facilities and workers into different workstations in such a manner that idle time is minimized and the bottlenecks if any in the assembly line are eliminated so that the smooth flow of products is ensured along the line to meet the customer demand. Lean in reality means less of everything be it human effort, inventory, investment and this concept is the soul of this paper. Cycle Time is optimized by reducing the bottlenecks in the workstations if any wherever possible and coupling the process with similar kind of operations on a single work station or designing the workstation is such a way so that the activities which cause increase in the cycle time are replaced with a more feasible work element. In this project work an attempt has been made to establish a lean route for the flow of materials in an Assembly Line of an automobile company and finding of this project work has been used as proposal to bring certain design changes in the workstations with bottlenecks so as to develop a perfectly balanced engine assembly section of the automobile company.