earticle

영어

The Standard Time method has often been applied for measuring work lead times in a manual assembly line. These work lead-times are grouped together to make workstations in the assembly line balanced. Although the work stations are balanced in a planning stage, the assembly line in an implementation stage is usually suffered from the unexpected unbalance between the work stations. This is caused by different skills among workers on the assembly line. The purpose of this research is to improve the balance of assembly line and increase the production output. An electronic company with manual assembly lines that has suffered serious line balancing problems has been chosen for this research. In this case study, ARENA is used as a simulation tool to compare and evaluate the current manual assembly line with two alternative plans. The first alternative plan was to focus on the line balancing using Standard Time. The second one was to focus on line balancing based not only on Standard Time but also on the individual worker's skill. Although the current system has not yet solved the line balancing problems, it has been used for a long time by a field manager as a trial and error method. Simulation results show that the second alternative plan is superior to the other two lines in terms of low work-in-process level and high production output. In addition, the results demonstrate that the worker's skill is one of the factors that have significant effect on grouping work stations in manual assembly lines.