Productivity improvement by apply lean techniques and simulation: A case study at Scancom Wood Manufacturing

Abstract

The problems of furniture manufacturing are long production lead time, bottle neck, inventory due to the line is unbalance, works are not standardize, wrong planning and some other problems. For eliminate the wastes in the production line, there are many line balancing techniques have been used for many years. However, the furniture manufacturing is based on manual- operation oriented system, which do not raise significant results with the techniques and difficult to forecast future events when fixing or changing the production system. If the manager want to develop the new system, he has to observe the real system. But observe the real furniture is difficult and expensive. This topic aims to evaluate and improve the existing production system by simulate the system and apply some lean technique to reduce the risk when built the new system. Value stream mapping (VSM) is used as a basic lean manufacturing tool and some other lean methods are used to find out the improved level of performance and productivity particularly in the wood factory in Vietnam, the situation is study in this paper is Scancom Company Limited. Also simulation software Arena is used to judge the sustainability of proposal. Keywords: simulation technique, line balancing, Value stream mapping (VSM), MOST, furniture manufacturing.