Productivity Improvement in an Appliance Industry : Employing Lean Concepts to Improve Productivity

In today's competitive world, higher productivity has become a necessity for companies and organizations to survive. With narrower margins, companies must thrive to find new ways to profit and many times the answer falls on productivity improvement. In order to be successful in the global market, organizations and partnering firms should dedicate themselves for improving productivity in a timely and collaborative manner. To this end, companies have undergone numerous changes over the years in terms of implementing new operations strategies, methods and technologies. The objective of the project is to improve the bottleneck processes in the refrigerator production line in order to improve the throughput and thus the hourly production. The initial work consisted of thoroughly investigating the root causes for low hourly production in manual & semi -automated line. Different QC tools were used to arrive at the probable reasons for the cause. Solutions were achieved by line balancing, andon implementation, process improvement to improve the hourly production and thus optimize the cycle times at individual stations.